The Amber Twilight
by Evil Riggs
Summary: Born under the light of strange times and portents, an unlikely hero must accept a familiar, painful responsibility. A reimagining of the series. Part I of The Legend of Zelda: Shadow Dawn. Rated M for sex, drugs, harsh language, and arterial spray.
1. 1

**THE LEGEND OF ZELDA:  
SHADOW DAWN**

**PART I:  
THE AMBER TWILIGHT**

**1**

Link moved across the tiles like a jerky green spider, pixilated edges jagged as a broken saw blade. He was a blur of green; a sword; a mash of wild color against a backdrop of bricks the shade of desert clay.

Before him: The Great and Final Door. Ganon. The Triforce. Zelda. The end.

No time to think. Peril lay just over the shoulder. Muscles twitched; body arched forward; hands aching; sweat oozing across the forehead and the nape of the neck. Ears ever listening, anticipating danger. Fingers at the ready, prepared for the quick dart and dodge from harm's way.

So close now. No turning back. It was time.

So goddamn hot.

Link proceeded through the tall, grainy door, sword at the ready.

Darkness.

And then:

_[deep breath]_

Ganon rose up like a bright phantom, undulating and twisting as he went. His flat orange cloaks billowed about his willow-reed arms. He clawed the air and snarled, bore his fangs, and bellowed, "Link! How _dare _you _enter _my _lair_! For this _insolence _you _will _die!" His pug-dog face, a straight palette brown, whipped forward. Ganon's wavering, awkward lips parted in a grotesque smile. "Die! Die! Die!"

There was a slight pause as the room lit completely. Chains dangled from the high ceiling and broken ladders leaned across the walls. Peculiar.

Ganon reduced in size, considerably. His robed shape darted forward and back across the filthy brick floor, tossing crackling balls of flame as it went. Link barely had time to react, raising his shield just in time to block the first of the sizzling missiles. He parried, halted a moment, and jumped forward to strike. Once, twice, three times he struck Ganon with stiff sword thrusts. Nothing.

Remember the fishmonger's advice?

Ganon slid forward again and let loose another volley of tiny fireballs. With no time to block, one struck Link head-on. He made a sound – pathetic, muffled, and full of static – but kept up.

Oh yeah. The fishmonger. And . . ._ the book._

It only took a moment to kneel and retrieve the tome. Ganon retreated across the room ahead. Only one chance for this. Link hurled the Book of Archemon in a perfect, illogical line. It struck Ganon full-on, and the monstrous sorcerer disappeared in a barely-perceptible plume of gray smoke.

At once, Ganon rose up again in all his glory, resplendent as a circus clown. "The, the _book_!" he cried. Beneath him, the Book of Archemon appeared and flopped open awkwardly, pages spinning as if caught in the wind. "Curse you _Link_! Cuuuurrrse _yyyooou_!" With that final cry, Ganon spun backward in a whirlpool of basic orange and red and brown, flailing his distorted limbs, and disappeared into the pages of the book. Its purple cover slammed shut, and (at long last) it was over once again.

. . . Once again.

Link was alone in that final, dismal room. Nothing moved. No sound. Half a mind to just stay there, take it in, make it a Zen moment. It could last forever, as far as Link cared. He would never thirst or get hungry or grow old. Just standing there, basking in his victory, he could experience eternity amongst the badly shaded bricks and motionless chains.

No. Better to move on. Better to get it over with. Link walked with high and painful steps to the door across the room. He entered.

Another pause, another bout of darkness. Then Zelda's pale face, jagged nose, and bright red lips filled the empty spaces. She spoke with strange halts between every fourth word. "Link!" she shouted, almost in the same tone and method as Ganon had. "How did you find. Me?"

Link spoke in a grating nasal whine. "Golly princess, it wasn't easy!"

"What took you so. Long?"

"Golly, Princess!" Link's face moved like a liquid painting.

"Oh, Link! I'm so glad that. You came to rescue. Me. Let's get the Triforce. And get out of here!"

"Yeah!" Link scooped Zelda into the crook of one arm, and for one moment the lines between them seemed to blur together. She smiled – a bizarre red-rimmed rictus – and the pair set off for Hyrule (presumably with the Triforce in tow, but one never knows these things). An obnoxiously yellow sun rose in the distance over pastel hills and valleys.

"Do you think that. Daddy will be happy to. See me?" Zelda asked.

"Gosh, princess. I'm sure he will! And I'm sure that there's gonna be a big feast waiting for us!" Link laughed, grinning. His smile was almost – though not quite – as disturbing as Zelda's. "Any chance of a kiss for rescuing ya'?"

Zelda laughed, each syllable as mechanical as a cogwheel. "Oh, Link."

And then it was done.

White text rolled over the darkness. Credits.

Lame.

I rolled my head back and muttered, "Bullshit."


	2. 2

**2**

I kicked back from the desk and angrily stripped off the cheap earphones I brought to the office each morning. Again: "Bullshit."

Somewhere above, an air conditioning vent rattled, chugged, and went silent. Other than the distant hiss of fans and someone's feverish typing, the office soaked in quiet. Umber dusk light trickled through the high windows and cast geometric shadows across the cubicles. The air above my desk sat stagnant and hot.

I leaned back in my stiff office chair and nudged my face just slightly beyond the entrance to my cubicle. I glanced left, then right. Neither of my supervisors stalked between the rows of office cubes. Nothing but shadows. Nothing but suspended dust dancing in shafts of sharp orange light.

Good. Must have gone home early. Fantastic.

Using the tips of my shoes, I pulled the chair back into the cubicle. I felt like a hermit crab retreating slowly and cautiously into its shell. I sighed, closed my eyes, and wiped sweat from my forehead.

Elsewhere, the furious typer continued unabated.

I opened one eye and looked at my watch. Five forty-six. I had spent enough time at work – it was time to get the hell out of Dodge.

With quick, memorized movements – movements I had perfected over three years and four office jobs – I closed the game emulator open on my monitor. The credits for The Legend of Zelda: Book of Archemon still rolled across the screen as I exited the program. Beneath it sat an open Excel spreadsheet, the day's data long since entered into seemingly-endless cells. I closed that out as well, deleted the emulated Zelda program, and set to doctoring the day's timesheet. A hop, skip, and jump of creative timekeeping later, I logged off the company computer and set to leaving. Other than the continuing storm of keystrokes from elsewhere in the cubicle maze, my noises were the only ones to break the still, soupy quiet.

Outside, the heat struck me like a wall. I winced, ran a hand through my hair, and set to walking. The bus stop was only three blocks away, but in the unseasonable weather, it felt like crossing the Gobi desert. By the time I reached the leaning bus shelter, my armpits had soaked a murky gray. Wonderful.

In the west, the sun sunk toward the horizon. A few wispy clouds burned brilliant orange, pink, and vermilion.

I sighed and turned to look down the street. Wavering like a dream image, the bus approached slow and steady, growling as it came.

Ahead of me was the weekend, as big and empty as a dead ocean.


	3. 3

**3**

My name is Linus Olsen. For better or worse, this is my story.

It all started with that purloined _Legend of Zelda_ game, the weekend, the heat, and the house party – though that's getting ahead of myself.

By the time that evening had rolled around, I had been working random office jobs for the better part of three years. Before that, I had waited tables, bussed tables, hauled bags of fertilizer, hauled rocks, hauled trees, shelved books, and mowed lawns since I was thirteen years old. All of those jobs had one thing in common – that blistering California heat. Up until I started working in cubicles, I took odd jobs each summer to pay for video games, then for college tuition. Once my stalled university career ended, so did the summer jobs. In their place came the endless parade of eight hour days, rent payments, and utility bills.

I was twenty-four years old. Everyone always told me that the best years of my life were yet ahead of me. Whenever they told me that – the HR women in pantsuits, balding middle managers, dead-eyed bus passengers, and even my mother – I always had to resist the urge to laugh. Yes. The best years of my life. They're just around the corner.

I knew that those words – "best" and "years" and "of your life" – held meaning for other people when strung together. And sure, they meant things to me, at least separately. It was the phrase – "best years of your life" – that always sounded so ridiculous to me. Whenever other people said it, let it burble out over their lips and into the air like an incantation, I felt as confused as I would watching a sitcom dubbed in German. If I repeated it, it felt at best foreign and at worst, something cobbled together from dead parts.

"The best years of your life." Always referred to in the present tense – or the future, if anyone actually knew me. Then the speaker would look nostalgic, chuff something about the best years of their lives, and change the subject. It wasn't science, but I had seen enough of the upturn-downturn of smiles speaking of those "best years" that I knew just what was going on behind them. People were ever the same all over.

These were The Best Years of My Life, as pondered over on that long bus trip home:

I, Linus Aaron Olsen, worked forty hours a week at a freelance data entry service, punching numbers into spreadsheets and databases for clients that I rarely, if ever, met. It was the sort of labor one can teach a chimp to perform, if one is so inclined. Each day, I finished my allotted document entry an average of two to two and a half hours early. During the remaining hours, I busied myself on Internet forums and with quasi-legal emulation programs, playing every video game I could salvage off the web. Then I went home.

I lived in a two-bedroom apartment with a two roommates, a set-up that worked remarkably well despite the basic mathematical challenge of it. By night, I ate whatever happened to be on hand and not too difficult to cook, smoked whatever marijuana was available in the collective stash, watched television or played video games, then went to bed. The next day? See: Work.

Repeat, with minor disturbances in schedule, five days a week for fifty-two weeks.

On the weekends, I attended parties and drank until vomiting; or, went to movie theaters, generally alone; or, slept until noon and left my room only to eat or relieve myself. There were admittedly combinations of the above, so I guess you can say that my weekends were a rich rainbow of possibility compared to weekdays.

I guess that the phrase "The Best Years of Your Life" was acutely alien to me because these years were exactly like the years before them, and the years before that. If this was the best that life had to offer, then what was the bad going to be like?

On the bus, I shivered with the thought. I gripped the cloth strap of my briefcase tighter and watched Los Angeles flow past me like a sea of smoldering, twilit concrete.


	4. 4

**4**

My dad used to say, "You made this bed, now you have sleep in it." My father was full of such nuggets of wisdom, before the brain tumor quietly slipped in – then out – of my family's life. It was his way of passing on what he saw as important to my sister and I, even if it was conveyed in platitudes and clichés.

By the time I was twenty-four and was riding the bus home from my empty little job, I had taken that one phrase and its variations to heart. I never complained about where I was in life, despite the fact that I knew I could do better. I had old friends who were making their way through law and medical school toward bright futures. A guy I knew from high school was already making sixty thousand dollars a year designing satellites out in Colorado.

And there I was. Riding the bus, because over a year had come and gone since my plucky '86 Honda Civic had finally given up the ghost.

I never complained, because I knew that this wasn't so much the hand I had been dealt as the hand I had chosen to play. I guess I could have gone on to do any of those things I mentioned (okay, maybe not the satellites) but (and probably not medical school either), but I made choices that had closed those doors forever. I had chosen to leave school without a degree, chosen to plunge into the job market without so much as a certificate as a life preserver, and those choices had shaped my life. There was no one to blame but me. I never even tried.

I wonder if I'm playing this up too much. After all, I didn't have a bad life. I wasn't orphaned. I wasn't huddled in a sodden box, shaking from the DTs and soaked in my own shit. I wasn't starving in some godforsaken African dustbowl. As of my last testing, I was free of all the diseases they speak about in sad, hushed tones.

I was, after all, alive.

But just that.

Looking back – what with the power of twenty-twenty vision and all – I think I was about six to eight months out from offing myself.

I know, I know. _Dramatic_.

I was alive, but that was all I had going for me. I worked, I ate, I slept. I played video games and got high. I just . . . lived. And that was it. Nothing else. I had no plans, no dreams, no aspirations. No ambition. I sometimes wondered if I was running from something – Dad's death, Mom's betrayal, responsibility, adulthood; choose your pop psychology pill of the moment and swallow with plenty of water. I wasn't running, really. I had stood my ground in the face of everything that happened, gotten through it, and made my life in its wake. The only problem was, I didn't have anything to run _toward_. I was as directionless as a ship caught in the Horse Latitudes.

I called it "apathy;" any physician worth their Hippocratic Oath would have called it "clinical depression." Had, well, _everything_, not taken place just as it did, I imagine whatever void was festering in me would have grown, branching out until it emptied me entirely. I always thought that if I had to do it, it would be pills. But, there were a dozen ways to go, just around the apartment. When I entertained those thoughts, they were just fancies – morbid daydreams. I'm sure, absolutely positive, that if I hadn't gone to that party, hadn't talked to Marilyn Reed, hadn't drunk a few too many cups of watery beer . . . Well, I don't think I would be here writing this.

Then again, I could be wrong. As it turns out, memory – and hindsight along with it – is never as crystal as you think. But now, as I lean back and pause, it's obvious. Even after all this time.

After all, that night – defeating the inane pixilated Ganon, riding the quiet bus, turning the key to the apartment, Stuart's voice, and that damnable omnipresent heat – is so clear in my mind that it's like yesterday. Even now, I can almost, _almost_, smell the marijuana vapor that came wafting through that open door.


	5. 5

**5**

"Dude." Stuart Ramirez's low, stolid voice rose from the living room.

I sniffed and quickly shut the front door. "Jesus, Stew," I said. "Why aren't you running the goddamn fans?"

The air conditioning in the apartment was functional, technically. Just as it was in my office building, the ducts and vents seemed to work diligently without ever producing any noticeable change in temperature. On days like this, it was customary for us to open all the windows and roar tall box fans through them. It was small comfort in this kind of stillborn heat, but had the added benefit of removing the thick stink of ganja before it moved through the vents to our upstairs neighbors.

I set my briefcase near the door and proceeded through the short front hall into the living room. The closed blinds on the windows cast alternating lines of black and burnt orange on the gray carpet.

"Oh, yeah. Shit, man. Sorry about that. I like, got caught up in this and forgot."

I rounded the couch that stood sentinel to the living room. Stuart sat slumped into its eggshell cushions, bare feet propped up on an ancient coffee table. Next to his feet were an open bag of generic corn chips and a bong.

Stuart Ramirez on the couch was a very different person than Stuart Ramirez standing. He was the sort of man whose every action seemed to twist him into a different shape and form. Each angle one viewed him at, he appeared to be a different man entirely. Here, as he sat bleary-eyed and motionless but for his hands, Stuart was a sloping blob of black and denim. His eyes drooped and his belly spilled out over his thighs. In profile, he was a rotten pear jammed up into the pillows. The impression was, like so much of Stuart, illusory; on his feet, he looked less like a couch vegetable and more like a fleshy mountain. His flab evened out, arms dangling to his hips, and he stared down with eyes like black earth. At six feet and six inches, he had to duck to get under certain doorways. When he moved, all heads turned to follow him – it was like watching the migration of a snarl-haired foothill. It was a wonder to follow his long, spindly legs as they propelled the bulk above them. Every aspect of that movement seemed fantastical and somehow wrong.

I moved to sit down on the end of the couch. Across the room, _Resident Evil 4_ played out on the apartment's only real luxury, a mid-sized high definition television. It had arrived the year before on the day after Christmas, bearing Florida postmarks. It had come with a tiny card with a pine tree on the front. Inside was neatly written: "I hope this isn't too extravagant. I know you like your movies and video games. Merry Christmas. Love, Mom."

Onscreen, Leon skulked through a dark passageway lit by torchlight. Far-off bleak voices chanted through the speakers mounted to either side of the television.

"You gonna turn on the fans?" Stuart asked. With one hand, he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

"Fuck you. Do it yourself."

"Hey. Hey. I'm in the middle of something." Stuart twitched. Leon emptied half a clip of handgun bullets into an oncoming cultist.

I sighed, loosened my tie, and undid the top button on my shirt. I had originally intended to flop onto the couch and prepare a rip off the bong, but my heart suddenly wasn't in it. As I moved to pull up blinds and open windows, I looked over my shoulder to Stuart. "Where's Allen?" I asked. As I bent down and grasped the edges of one of the box fans, something howled and splattered on the screen behind me.

"Out. Said something about . . . fuck, what was it?" I peered back at Stuart, shimmying the fan in my hands onto the open windowsill. Somewhere outside, the sound of a police siren cut through the constant white noise of LA traffic. Stuart screwed up his forehead in thought for a moment, then blurted, "Oh yeah! Yeah. He said he had a, uh, a date. Or something."

"Ah." I plugged the fan in and it began to hum pleasingly. Already, I could feel the air current begin to shift the most egregious of the smoke out into twilight. It wouldn't do anything at all for the heat – it was pretty much the same temperature inside as it was out – but the illusion would be enough. At that point, I was really more concerned about the neighbors and the rich, piney smell of Stuart's bong activities. "Seriously. A date? Allen?"

"Yeah." He sniffed.

I paused between the first and second living room windows. "He coming to Jeff's party?" I asked.

"Naw. I think he's bugging out north again for a bit. Sounded like this was serious."

"How can a date be serious?"

"Shit if I know, man. That's what he said. 'I've got a date,' and, uh, 'You may not see me for a bit.' Par for the fucking course." He stopped for a moment, and machine gun fire erupted. "Hey, you want to light it up?" Stuart gestured to the burnt green glass of the bong.

"Maybe later," I sighed. I stood full height, reached back, and stripped off the elastic band holding my hair back in a ponytail. I felt the greasy weight of it fall and stick to the sweat coating my neck. It pooled on my shoulders and fluttered in my eyes until I brushed it back with absent fingers. "We have any beer?"

"A couple of Stone IPAs left." Stuart tilted his chin upward in the direction of the kitchenette. His eyes never left the television screen.

I considered this. Part of me – a significant part – felt like getting lit up well before Ramon arrived. Though I hadn't shied away from a party since I was eighteen, I still navigated large crowds of strangers better with a healthy buzz. Marijuana would make me dopey and stone-faced; beer would make me sharp, witty, smooth. Airtight logic. (Not really). Whatever. The India Pale Ale it was.

"When is Ramon coming by to pick us up?" I asked. I busied myself with the second window and fan.

"Round eight thirty. Shouldn't take us long to get there. I think. Should we wait for Allen?"

"Do we ever?"

Stuart laughed. Onscreen, a pale man's head exploded. Bruised purple tentacles came flailing from the ragged stump of his neck.

As I maneuvered the second fan into position, I said, "Man, you remember that obscure Zelda game I told you about? _The Book of Archemon_?" The decision to change the subject was a conscious one. Conversations between Stuart and I tended to go that way, skirting around the subject of Allen Eklund like a creek parting about a rock outcropping.

Stuart seemed to consider the question in depth, as if I had just asked him what he thought of the war in Darfur. Finally, "Oh – yeah. Yeah man. What about it?"

"I finally downloaded a ROM of it today."

"And?"

"Fucking awful."

Stuart laughed again, a growling series of chuckles. "What's it even like?"

I turned the second of the fans on, ready to move on to the third, then the bedroom windows. "It's kinda like _Zelda 2_. Remember how that one was a side-scroller?"

"Yeah."

"Same basic idea, but it's like these guys – despite having the license for the property – didn't know what the hell it was about. It has Zelda and Link and Ganon, but that's all it really has in common with the other games. And – Jesus – it has these fucking animated cut scenes that look like they were thrown together by a kindergarten class."

"You beat it, at least?"

"Oh yeah," I chuckled. I wiped sweat from my forehead with the sleeve of my shirt. "An hour-forty-five, tops."

He whistled in sarcastic astonishment. "Well," Stuart said, "at least you can say that you've played every _Legend of Zelda_ game ever made, right?"

I nodded. "Yeah. Even the dogshit third-party titles." I breathed deep and tasted marijuana smoke and body odor. I looked out the third window framing the living room. The light was dying away grudgingly. Los Angeles sat in a haze of dark orange and shadows. The hills to the east had just begun to glitter with distant lights.

Another party. Wonderful. The prospect no longer excited me. There would be booze and drugs and perhaps a woman loose enough to bed, if I was lucky. I was not optimistic. The most I could muster at such thoughts was a vague apprehension or nervousness – sensations I would soon kill with the cold taste of malt and hops. Apathy, as ever, was the only response that I could ever seem to conjure.

At that moment, elbow on the windowsill, electric fan resting against my shins, I wondered why that was. Without the added advantage of years – the advantage I now enjoy – it was as difficult as it was fruitless. Hot wind rifled through my hair with rude hands. A stink of rotting garbage and car exhaust came with it, summoned from beyond the window. Am I depressed? Should I tell someone that I can't seem to make myself care about anything? I scoffed inwardly. Who was there to tell? Stuart was an old friend, but we didn't enjoy a connection beyond shared interests. Lira? Despite being the closest thing to a decent answer, my sister was hundreds of miles away, wrapped up in the vagaries of her own life. Better not to burden her with my own idiot musings.

What about Mom?

I squinted.

No. Fuck no. Never again. I had tried that shit before, and now look where I was.

Focus.

I shook my head and brushed long, rogue hairs from my eyes. Beyond those that I listed, there was no one else. Allen didn't count – not even remotely – and my coworkers were as alien to me as moblins or octorocks.

It didn't matter. Nothing was wrong with me. Couldn't be. I was just in a rut, right? Things would get better. They had to. And if they didn't, what did it matter? The world didn't revolve around me. I was nobody. Life went on, with or without me. I had my small life, insignificant in the grand scheme, and that was sufficient. There was no use complaining.

I sighed again. With a series of quick, mechanical movements I set up the third of the fans. This close, the spin of the three box fans nearly shut out the gunfire and chanting emanating from the TV.

"I'm gonna go set up the other windows and take a shower," I said. I trudged back through the living room, rounded the three barstools set up along the kitchen counter, and entered the kitchenette. I brusquely opened and closed the bare refrigerator, plucking out a bottle of beer like I was raiding a nest for eggs. It was time to prepare for the rest of my night.


	6. 6

**6**

I wasn't always prone to drinking beer in the shower. And yet, there I was – naked, lukewarm water streaming down my back, one arm crooked out past the shower curtain, hand clasped around the brown bottle. I suppose that there comes a point when apathy overwhelms judgment.

The shower itself was one of those low-flow deals, wherein a pressure valve was set into the showerhead and pipes. It felt less like a shower than getting spritzed by watering can that had been sitting in the sun.

It was just as well – the swimming heat made a strong, hot shower unthinkable. The urinary trickle that sprayed across me was all that I could stand. I needed it only to wash away the day's oppressive sweat and grime, not to refresh and invigorate me. A cold shower was out of the question. I had no desire to harsh whatever buzz I gained from the pale ale. As it was, the difference of cold, hoppy alcohol running down my throat and warm water trickling across my back was refreshing enough. In order to drink the open beer with minimum interference, I merely needed to step to the far end of the bathtub, and thus out of range of the weak jet of water behind me. Within moments, the dull stress of the day's small annoyances – the heat, work's inane march, the disappointment of _The Book of Archemon_, the heat, Stuart's casual approach to apartment precautions, and the fucking heat – seemed to smooth out and become manageable.

I probably shouldn't drink a 6.9% beer on an empty stomach, I thought. Whatever. Fuck that. The sooner I get ripped, the sooner I stop caring.

Not that I cared much in the first place.

It had occurred to me as I stripped down and stepped into the tub that this was a stopgap measure at best. After all, the stored sun would soon pulse up out of the concrete and blacktop. It would likely be unbearably hot all night long.

I turned the shower knob off and felt a brief, tingling jet of cold water. Stepping out of the bathtub, the day's ambient heat once again washed over me. I darted blindly past the bottle of beer and grabbed a stick of deodorant. If there was to be any hope of scoring tail at this party, I would have to at least smell half-decent.

You're a shallow man, Linus.

_Whatever._

After a liberal application of deodorant, I switched the bottle into my hand and took a long swig. Bitter up front, smooth finish. A good beer. Water pooled between my toes.

I set the bottle back down in front of the neatly arranged rows of deodorant sticks, shaving cream cans, cologne bottles, and toothbrushes. I looked up. A gangly, six-foot nerd stared back at me from the mirror with wide, sunken blue eyes. A sharp, triangular nose. Skin drawn tight along the jutting bones – about the cheek ridges, shoulder blades, and elbows. Long, burnished blonde hair hung in wet willow strands across eyes and shoulders. The body's little musculature stood out in sharp relief against scrawny forearms and long, spidery fingers. A tattoo stood out on the image's left bicep – a trio of black triangles, one stacked on top of the apexes of the remainders. The Triforce, as it were.

Whenever I looked at that tattoo, I felt equal twinges of regret and admiration. Admiration because I had had the wherewithal to commission the tattoo while stone sober. Regret for any number of reasons – the tattoo was high maintenance and would fade with time; I had to explain it to everyone who ever saw me with my shirt off; and, inevitably, it branded me as, at the very least, a man who had chosen relative social exile. Only sweet, skinny Rachel Raines – who came and went from my life in the space of three weeks – understood it on sight. She had clapped her hands and laughed delightedly as I removed my shirt. We laid there, cheek to cheek and flesh to flesh, talking Zelda for the better part of an hour. What followed was the best and most raucous sex I had ever had.

I grimaced at my reflection. That had been over two years ago. Nothing since had ever lived up to the promise of that night.

I drained the rest of the beer. Bitter foam slid past my tongue and tonsils. Christ. Finished that quickly. With nothing on my stomach, I would feel that soon.

I wrapped a towel about my mid-section and exited the bathroom. The temperature never changed in my short jaunt across the hall and into my bedroom. Nothing but static heat, crowding out sensation and stifling thought. It made me slightly light-headed. Perhaps it was the beer. Pussy.

I closed my bedroom door, as much in ritual as in deference to my nakedness. My room was a safe zone, ensconced from the rest of the apartment. Here, I could arrange things as I liked without the fear of anyone disturbing their order. Out in the living room and kitchenette, I might clean and organize for hours, only to have Stuart carelessly bumble through and upset it all. My bedroom remained in planned, pristine condition despite whatever chaos erupted outside it. Stuart (or Allen, I suppose) might leave open peanut butter jars on the counter, or splatter nacho cheese across the inside of the microwave, or leave open dishes of leftovers to mold in secret corners, or spill bong water under the coffee table, or store bags of bread on the couch . . . And all at the same time, my personal domain remained untouched. It was the only place in the apartment where I could be truly serene without the aid of chemicals.

What? Yes, I suppose that I was something of a neat freak. Not OCD, by any stretch of the imagination. You live with a man who forgets to remove the bowls of Cheerios out from under his bed and see how you react. What little remained of the architect in me cherished uncluttered space, clean angles, and organized hierarchies. It was like a very small, personal sect of feng shui. Planning and arranging each aspect of the room soothed me.

. . . Moving on.

I dressed quickly, replacing the workday's slacks and white-collar shirt with worn jeans and a loose-fitting Vikings jersey. I glanced to the corner of the room, where a tall, glass-fronted cabinet squatted like a totem. A television perched on its top. Below it, within the cabinet space itself, were no less than six video game consoles. Each generation of Nintendo system had its representative shelf, arranged in ascending order by age. At the very bottom shelf was a lonely, stalwart Playstation. A vague gesture toward diversity. A bookshelf arranged ninety degrees to the cabinet held its necessary treasures: Hundreds of game cartridges and disc cases, ordered just as meticulously as the consoles that played them. The twin pieces of furniture and the collections within were my pride and joy, if I had such a thing.

A hollow pounding resonated from outside the room. The front door. I looked down at my watch. I blinked. It was barely fifteen until eight – Ramon was very early.

I began to sweat. If it _was_ Ramon.

I exited the room just in time to see Stuart amble from the couch and toward the door. The smell of marijuana still drifted through the apartment, despite the insistent churning of the fans. What if it was the cops? The early, buzzy feeling the beer had begun to summon within me suddenly felt wrong. Deadening. A burden. I was suddenly very glad that I hadn't taken Stuart's offer of a toke off the bong – paranoid apprehension already wrung through me as it was. My shoulders clenched and I could feel full sweat beads on the back of my neck. So much for the shower.

Stuart shot me a look of puzzlement and reached for the doorknob. All I could do was watch and nod gravely. He opened the door.

"Hey guys."

I sucked in a hot sigh of relief.

Allen's short, hunched form darkened the open doorway.


	7. 7

**7**

Allen Eklund, the "Third Roommate," was an incorrigible layabout. He was a scalawag, a scoundrel, and an entrepreneur of illegal means. Which is to say: Allen was a wanted criminal, drug dealer, and an all-around lazy fucking bastard. But we loved him all the same.

He didn't appear on our rent contract, and as such not much more than fraternal camaraderie bound him to pay a share of the rent. And he did pay rent . . . on occasion. As he came and went on a whim, sleeping on the couch and eating few meals, we didn't grudge him the intermittent payments. His own income ebbed and flowed with the tide of drugs that streamed into southern California. Weed, cocaine, ecstasy, K, and acid – at one point or another, Allen had dealt all of them with the kind of bright-eyed professionalism that would make any sales manager glow with pride. When the market for his drug of choice was brisk (and when Allen had the motivation), Stuart and I could expect a neatly-packed envelope full of cash. Sometimes, the envelope would come with a sticky green nugget of cannabis, sealed in a zippered sandwich bag.

I remember those days as being particularly good ones. Relieved of one third of the burden of our rent and flush with wacky tobacky, we would celebrate in our way – pizza, video games, and bong-soaked laughter late into the night. Those moments went a long way toward making up for all the absent months, strange phone calls, and sweaty midnights listening to approaching police sirens.

Allen himself was an unassuming presence. His slight body tended to lean against doorframes and room corners. He cut his brown hair short and shaved obsessively. Like Stuart, his wary eyes took in details from behind black-framed glasses.

Now, tilting in through the front door, he wore a conservative pair of jeans and a plain, clean black tee-shirt. He carried a gray duffle bag slung over one shoulder.

"I got stood up," he said. His voice was flat and emotionless. He shuffled through the front hall and lobbed the duffle onto the couch. Flopping next to it, he removed his glasses and massaged the point where the bridge of his nose met his forehead.

"You got stood up?" I asked, incredulous.

"Yeah."

"So it _was_ a date," I mused. I grinned slightly, thought better of it, and attempted a more somber expression. With the single bottle working its light magic, the effort was more difficult than it should have been. I sidled onto the couch and grabbed Stuart's bag of chips with an absent hand.

Allen shook his head. "I guess. Sort of."

"Sort of?" Stuart suddenly loomed behind the couch, arms crossed. "Dude . . . details."

"She's a supplier." Short, clipped tones. Allen stared forward into space, his glasses still folded in one hand.

"Oh. So – a business date." I crammed a handful of corn chips between my lips and began to munch. I hoped that some starch might begin to counterbalance the previous beer.

"Yes and no." A short, pregnant pause hung between us. Then: "See, I really like her. Have for a while. But she's got this boyfriend, right?" He raised his eyebrows.

Stuart and I nodded. I popped another chip in my mouth and began sucking the salt from its ridges.

"So, like a month ago he breaks up with her and takes off for Hawai'i or some shit. She's a tough girl but she starts wanting to hang out more and more, just to talk. Less business. And I get it in my head that maybe I can make my move now, tell her what I feel. I put it off and put it off and . . ." He sighed. "Last week she told me she had some E to offload. I'm . . . such an idiot. I asked her if she wanted to get some dinner before the buy. I planned to ask her if she wanted to go to Oakland with me while I sold my cut. I have some buyers set up, see? It was all planned out. Dinner, tell her how I felt about her, go in halfsies on the sale. Get a relationship going."

Such stories almost always made me apprehensive. Allen already had a warrant out for his arrest. The mere relation of drug anecdotes made me think that a SWAT team was soon to come bursting through our doors and windows. That night, I listened to Allen's story with a blasé feeling that I had heard this all before. No such images of men in black body armor came to me. Maybe it was the beer. Asshole.

Allen continued, "So I got everything together. Cash in case she doesn't want a cut of the Oakland sale. Clothes." He sniffed. "Condoms. And I go to the restaurant and I wait and wait and sure enough she doesn't show. She's never done that shit. Never. Not as a friend, not as a supplier. Jesus. I called her a half-dozen times. No answer."

Stuart chuckled. "Maybe the Bishop got her."

The Bishop tended to float in and out of conversation those days, flitting between stories like a blood-soaked phantom. Another of his victims had been found in Compton a mere week before, slashed to ribbons. I say "he" only because serial killers are statistically more likely to be men. The police didn't like to admit it, but this one had them baffled. Some of the local papers were already claiming that this was the new Zodiac killer; a Jack the Ripper for a new century. As with his three other kills, the Bishop had left crosses carved into the victim's torso. No other evidence whatsoever.

Allen whipped around in his seat so quickly that I couldn't help but jerk backwards in surprise. "Don't even fucking joke about that shit. I'm really," a deep breath, "really worried right now."

I swallowed a lump of corn mush, then asked quietly, "What's her name?"

Allen seemed to calm slightly, turning back toward me. "Lacey."

"Last name?"

Allen cracked a weak half-smile. "Trade secrets, Linus." Then, softly, "It's not like you would have met her anyway."

Stuart, ever sensitive while stoned, said, "Aren't you taking this too hard, dude? I mean . . ." He gestured with one large, calloused hand. " . . . It's not like you walked in and she was blowing her ex under the table. I've been stood up before. It sucks, but there's usually a reason. Well." He scratched his head. "I guess there wasn't with me. She was just a bitch." Stuart trailed off, as he was wont to do in this kind of situation. In that moment, I briefly resented having met him during sixth-grade math.

"You don't get it," Allen huffed. "She doesn't do this shit. It's not her. She's like me – this is business, even if it is on the down-low. She doesn't take her own shit. She doesn't live in some crack house, selling to kids and bums. Like I said, she wholesales. Pure professional."

I wanted a sandwich. Call me cruel, but in that moment nothing mattered more to me than a ham goddamn sandwich and nothing was going to stop me. I stood, and in mid-motion seemed to remember where I was. As I walked to the kitchenette, I attempted, "Maybe she just missed the bus."

"She drives," Allen said miserably.

"Maybe she broke down. And . . . her cell phone ran out of batteries while she was calling AAA. That happened to my sister once."

"Linus . . . please."

Christ. I was not nearly drunk enough for this. Already, the quiet pseudo-buzz of the Stone IPA was fading. As skinny as I was, I had a fairly decent tolerance for booze. I tended to blame it on the old Scandinavian blood in my veins . . . but I'm fairly certain every American drinker attributes his or her tolerance to their ethnic heritage, no matter what it is.

I busied myself with sandwich-making, darting about the cramped kitchenette as I talked. "Seriously, man. It sounds like she got held up someplace and either forgot her phone or left it off."

"You think she got robbed?" Allen sounded distressed, but not surprised.

I reconsidered my words. "Uh . . . no. Sorry. Like, 'delayed.' Car out of the picture, train's late . . . that shit."

"More like she was weirded out by the invite and fucked off for a while," Allen sighed.

"Then why'd she accept in the first place?" I asked. My hands worked nearly subconsciously, deftly assembling a few surviving slices of ham with bread and spicy mustard.

He didn't answer. Between the two of us, Stuart looked on with an increasingly less-glazed expression. Finally, as I placed the finishing touches on the sandwich, Stuart said, "Dude, you want to come to a party my brother's throwing at his place? Ramon's showing up in, like," he seemed to concentrate hard, "fifteen minutes."

Allen shook his head. "I need to stick around, just in case she calls."

"It's a cell phone, Allen. You can take it anywhere." Stuart leaned over the couch and smiled.

"It'll take your mind off of things," I suggested. I held my sandwich aloft with one hand, considered it, and took a bite. The bread was dry, the ham old. The mustard evened it all out, strong and cracking against my tongue. Not spectacular, but what I needed. I considered that I suddenly wanted Ramon to arrive for the first time that night, if only to get away from Allen's moping. I suppose that we can't stand that which we hate most within ourselves.

The fans churned hot city air in and out of the room. The light continued to fail.

Allen spoke up. "We have any beer here?"

"Just one bottle," I answered, mouth half-full.

"Will there be beer at the party?"

"Inevitably."

"Fine then," he sighed. "Fine. I'll go. No need to shower, even." Allen laughed sadly.

I didn't bother to ask him if getting drunk was wise, given his position. As terrible as it is to admit, I half-wanted him to finally do something that would get him arrested. At least then I wouldn't have to compare my life to a drug dealer, and see it come up wanting.


	8. 8

**8**

Ramon Aguilar, a mutual acquaintance of Stuart and Jeff Ramirez, swung by the apartment to pick us up at exactly the appointed time. I had partied with Ramon on multiple occasions, which made it all the more remarkable that I had never exchanged as much as a single word with him. He was a smooth, tall man who dressed in pressed shirts and impeccable slacks. While he waited for Stuart to finish last-minute preparations and pile into the idling SUV, Ramon smoked American Spirit cigarettes and listened to unidentifiable music on an iPod. His only greeting was a short, sharp-eyed nod.

It goes without saying that I did not break any records that night – at least, none with Ramon. I never spoke to him. He returned the favor.

The glacial blast of air conditioning that met me inside the SUV was like manna beamed from the heavens. I sighed audibly and smiled, settling into the faux leather of the back seat. Fuck the party – this was where it was at.

Jeff Ramirez was four years younger than Stuart. Like Stuart, Jeff received a stipend from a trust fund set up by his parents, who had long since retired and moved to a suburb outside Sacramento. I could only imagine that a good portion of that stipend went toward the numerous parties Jeff and his housemates held. Whereas Stuart had joined the Army the moment he had graduated from high school, Jeff had attended UCLA. He was currently in the throes of an Applied Economics degree, and as such was throwing this party in defiance of the oncoming school year.

Jeff's house was a rambling, illogical affair set into the hills surrounding the UCLA campus. It was fairly nice for a college home, free of the peeling paint and exposed drywall I had known in my tenure as a student renter. He shared the place with three other guys whose names escape me. All I know is that each of them oozed the sort of youthful confidence only a Business major can muster. They drifted through their parties with the airs of men utterly in control of their destinies. One got the sense that their lives were as smooth and open as a freeway at 3 AM.

Naturally, I despised them.

On the other hand, I was on fairly good terms with Jeff himself. He loved his big brother despite his faults, was always welcoming and hospitable, and seemed to keep a serious mind about him even while relaxing with a cocktail or joint in hand. We could talk long and hard about football, debating players' merits and team statistics. As such, I gravitated toward him early into his parties, hoping to break the initial jittery ice. Once our conversations waned, he tended to introduce me to one student or another. By that time, I was usually sauced enough to continue the conversation with whoever it was I had just met, most often petering out into awkward small talk. Whatever. Anything that got me through to that final, nail-pounding beer.

It's not as if I didn't appreciate such moments. The last time I had gotten laid had sprung directly from one of Jeff's smiling, boozy introductions. What was her name, again? Regina, Kate, Tanya, Sarah, Kara? No. Who was it, then? Lord, I had been drunk. Laura? Ha. Yes. Laura. She had barely remembered my name the next morning. Obviously, I wasn't much better off.

The memory of that blurred, near-blackout encounter came back to me as we neared the party. I felt my face screw up in self-loathing and disgust. That had been over six months ago. God, I was a loser.

By the time I slouched through Jeff Ramirez's front door, the ghostly buzz of that first blessed beer had worn off. I could feel distant bass beats as they chugged up through the floorboards and the soles of my shoes. A decent crowd of partygoers had formed by the time we arrived, spreading out through the rooms, hallways, and stairwells of the split-level home. I watched as Stuart, Allen, and Ramon split off and vanished past a wall of babbling coeds. I lingered near the door for a moment, soaking up the strange half-light and pulsing ambient heat. My heart wasn't in this. Fuck it. Time to find the keg.

And find it I did, after wandering past a dozen faces I didn't recognize. Past the front living room was a kitchen milling with college students. To the left of that was a short staircase that led to the lower level of the house. I could see the sliding glass door in the room below was open – beyond, tiki torches lit the vast back yard. Flickering shadows played across the shaggy lawn and the rippling surface of a small but serviceable swimming pool. A concrete patio extended out from the back door to the pool edge, scattered with occupied plastic lawn chairs. What I sought rested against the wall beside the sliding door, sitting in a massive washtub full of ice. Beside it was a rickety card table laden with red plastic cups, bowls of perfunctory snack foods, and handles of various hard liquors. I briefly felt like a heel for not bringing anything to reinforce the party's stores. Briefly.

I filled one of the ubiquitous cups with a protracted blast from the keg and brought it to my lips. A shadow suddenly appeared on the wall before me, twitching at the edges in the torchlight. I turned to see Stuart leaning over me with a curious look in his eyes. As ever, how such a hulk of a man could move so quietly eluded me.

"What's in the keg?" he asked.

I let the beer roll past my lips and swish about my mouth. It was weak, bitter at the edges, and very, very cold. At least they got that right.

"Key Light," I answered. I didn't bother to mask the disappointment in my voice.

Stuart grimaced, but moved to fill his own cup. "I told Jeff. I told him. It's going to take ten of these fucking things to even get a decent buzz on." He gulped down the fizzy, yellow beer with genuine worry in his cheeks. Stuart shook his dark, curled mane of hair and grabbed the hose to pour himself another. "I really wish I had toked again before we left," he said mournfully. "I'll catch up with you later. This may take a while."

I shrugged and wandered away from the beverage station, into the growing body of the party.

Jeff sat at the far end of the patio. He was at least as tall as Stuart, though narrower of face and much thinner of build. Dark hair tamed with a slick sheen of gel. His long body was festooned in cargo pants and a bright green Hawaiian shirt. He slouched in a lawn chair and gestured with a tumbler of brown liquor as he spoke. A lit cigarette dangled from his lips, its hot red tip bobbing up and down rhythmically. At Jeff's side was a demure blonde in a miniskirt. She nodded emphatically at what he said, her entire attention wrapped about his words.

I raised my hand in greeting. Jeff raised his eyebrows and returned the gesture, but continued to speak to the girl sitting cross-legged beside him. I made the only polite decision that I could – I peeled away from my original course, continuing out past the patio and about the edge of the pool. Out here, the chuggachuggachugga of DJ'ed music died down to distant war drums. I could hear the insistent chirping of crickets in the grass.

The horizon had gone a dark purple. Out in that bruised sky, I could almost pick out a few glittering points. Within an hour or two, their number would grow to several dozen or more, punctuated by the red running lights of jets and nomad wisps of night clouds. That was the most I would see. Here in Los Angeles, the sky would never quite resolve itself into pure, star-lined blackness.

I downed the rest of the beer. It was cold, and it would get me drunk. That was enough. Rounding the final corner of the pool, I returned to the patio door to get another.


	9. 9

**9**

Those two cups of beer became three, then four, then six.

I've always observed that while drinking, I literally become of two minds. One – the "Surface Me," as it were – grows talkative, walks with wide strutting steps, and laughs far too often. The "Other Me," an inner me, looks upon all this from a vague frontier deep within my mind. It has no control over what the Surface Me does or says, but can still shake its ethereal head and scoff in disbelief. These two facets split off from one another that night at about my fourth beer. Even as I ambled about the patio and living rooms and furnished basement, a part of me was able to see just how fast and far I was falling.

The night began to curl at the edges. My gestures flailed out. My voice quickened and gained volume.

I bobbed my head beside the house DJ Jeff had hired, watching his fingers work the hot black vinyl.

I laughed quietly to myself as I peed, holding my beer aloft in one upturned hand as if I was giving a toast.

Ignoring my earlier discretion, I pulled a seat up to Jeff and attempted to badger him about Minnesota's chances in the upcoming season. That same wide-eyed blonde still sat next to him. Even several drinks in, I turned away from Jeff's icy gaze and low-spun words and winked at him. Good luck, buddy. Score one for the home team. I didn't speak with him again until the end of the night.

I laughed out loud as two girls pulled each other into the pool, giggling as they went.

Back in the basement, feeling the pulsing electronica as it reverberated through the walls and into the pads of my fingers, I caught Allen staring out from a corner with a cup in hand. I moved his way and asked him (yelling over the thunderous music) if Lacey had gotten back to him. He gave me a sullen look, but said nothing. Just as Jeff's dark understated words had, that single look seemed to cut through the building alcohol with an acute warning. These were not places I wanted to tread.

I wandered, drinking. A smiling, wasted girl with a shaved head offered me a shot in the kitchen, and I obliged her. We and three of her diminutive, tattooed friends threw back tiny glasses of rum. Burning bright in the back of the throat. The bald girl shot me an approving look, and then she was gone. Both she and her companions disappeared into the sweltering night as quickly as they had come.

I briefly considered going after them, wherever they were. Heavens help me if I had.

As if in ritual, I nodded to Ramon from across a room swarming with chattering bodies. Then I laughed. How could I not?

The disconnect of space and time grew with each bubbling mouthful. Timelines lost much of their meaning.

All of this is not to say that I was in the middle of a full-on, knockout drunk. As I mentioned before, I had more tolerance than that. I had experienced far more wasted nights in my time. As it was, this was an average weekend for me. My inebriated ramble was a practiced one.

All the same, it goes without saying that I was in no condition to drive or operate heavy machinery.

By the time I filled my sixth cup of beer to the chewed plastic of its rim, I had become accustomed to the fast, swaying sensation of my drunkenness. I guess that one could call this my second wind – I was undoubtedly shitfaced, but the symptoms were evening out. I turned from the keg and ambled back through the sliding door. Much of the party had migrated from the stifling confines of the house out into the back yard. I could hear splashing from the pool. The constant synthetic drumbeat from downstairs had subsided. The DJ must have been taking a smoke break. With only a few stragglers lazing about couches and chairs, the lower living room was now relatively quiet.

I selected a well-worn couch in the corner and sat down.

Sipping the newly-poured beer, I glanced left and right. A young woman sat at the opposite end of the couch. Funny, I hadn't noticed her when I sat down. Odd.

She was pretty in an undeniable way – long brunette hair, gray eyes, a soft chin. Her hands lay folded over a pink purse in her lap. Tight jeans, sensible shoes. I lingered a moment on the rise and fall of her breasts, then forced my eyes away. Don't be an idiot. Don't stare.

She seemed to catch my look and smiled politely. Not able to really help myself, I smiled back. I took another sip of beer, then set the cup on the end table beside me. A table lamp cast weak yellow light over my movements.

A better, more rational Surface Me might not have taken the next step. The Other Me could only sigh and rock back on its heels, hoping that the embarrassment would be minimal.

I leaned forward and extended my hand. "Hi, I'm Linus. Linus Olsen." It took utter concentration not to trip over those few familiar words.

She seemed to regard me more fully then. My throat constricted as she brushed a bang from her forehead and examined me. Without even thinking, I slicked sweat out from beneath my ponytail with my left hand. Stupid hand. Stupid, absent hand! Didn't it have something better to do, like staying _stock fucking still_? I suddenly wanted to be drunker, higher, alone, dead. Anything to avoid that gaze. She looked at me like something crawling beneath the lens of a microscope.

In all actuality, her appraising look lasted no longer than ten or fifteen seconds. I had felt every one of them. As I said, my sense of time had taffied badly. She smiled again and grasped my hand with her own.

"Marilyn Reed," she said. Her voice was quiet and measured. The skin of her hand felt smooth and cool against my own.

I probably shook her hand too long, gave her too much of my clammy skin. I released her grip and immediately began talking.

"Nice to meet you, Marilyn. How's your night going?"

"Oh," she folded her hands back over the vinyl purse, "it's going okay. You?"

Boisterously, "The same, I guess. Getting drunk, at least." I laughed to myself, saw her blank expression, and cut myself off. I deliberately lowered the volume of my voice, clearing my throat before I began again. "Where are you from, Marilyn?"

"Originally?"

"Sure." Back on track. Good, good. Focus. I fastened my gaze to her face, unwilling to let it drift downward.

"Well, I'm from San Diego," she said. "But I'm going to school up here. I live just a few blocks away."

"Cool, cool," I said enthusiastically. "I used to go to school here too." Eyes forward. Listen. Don't over-talk this. For some reason, I was feeling optimistic.

"You went to UCLA?" Marilyn asked. For a moment, her features perked with curiosity. "What did you graduate in?"

I laughed again, hoping it didn't sound too bitter. "Uh . . . ha. Nothing. I dropped out of the architecture college a few years ago."

"Oh." Marilyn seemed to intensely study her fingernails. An awkward silence began to gel between us. To my surprise, she was the one who broke its formation. She looked up, pointed to my purple jersey, and asked, "So, uh, are you from Minnesota originally?"

I let out a relieved breath. "This? Oh yeah. _This_. Yes. I mean," I shook my head in momentary frustration, "yes, I was born in Minnesota. St. Paul, actually. My dad's job moved us out here when I was nine, though."

"What's he do? Your dad, I mean."

I fell silent. My smile deadened but did not drop, and for a moment I felt a horrible disconnect between my face and my brain. At last, I managed, "He . . . he used to be a chief engineer in the water department. He. Um. He died four years ago." I forced myself to look away from her as I said it, out into the living room and the stairs that led to the kitchen.

In the corner of my vision, I could see her expression disintegrate from enigmatic disinterest to alarmed dismay. "Oh God! I, I'm _so _sorry! I didn't –"

I cut her off. "No, no. Don't worry about it. It's cool." Not a lie, really. Four years was a hell of a gulf. I barely even saw pictures of the old man those days. He was a beloved but distant phantom.

Out above the lower living room, a man my height and half again my width strolled around the corner of the kitchen and looked down the short flight of stairs. He held a cup to his lips and stared down at me from beneath a beaten Raiders cap. I watched his eyes narrow and his fingers tighten against the brittle cup. Another guy tugged at his elbow, laughing at some unheard joke. Still, the man in the cap looked at me.

Beside me, Marilyn timidly asked, "Do you mind if I ask . . . how he died?"

I turned back to her, and the man at the top of the stairs disappeared from my field of vision. It took me a moment to answer. "Brain cancer. The quick kind. Nothing we could do." I sighed and blindly grabbed for my beer. "I think he died three months after the diagnosis. Didn't even try chemo."

"That's horrible!"

"That's life," I said. The edges of my mouth curled into a bleak little smile. I met her eyes. "One moment someone's here, and in the next they're nothing but memories and shadows." I paused, startled. That was unusually deep for me.

Marilyn fell silent. Her eyes avoided mine, falling back to her lap. Her hands squirmed about one another nervously. Oh, wonderful. Way to be Captain Bring-Down. Better change the subject. I sucked beer foam and whipped the cup back to its place beside the lamp.

"So, what's your major?" The transition was awkward, and in my haste my S's had lengthened and melted nearly into Sh's. I heard it and resolved to try harder. This was worth it.

"I'm pre-med. Cellular Biology," Marilyn answered. She still didn't look up.

"Cool. That's cool," I chimed. "What are you looking to do?"

"Dunno," she said. I swore that she was getting quieter. "Maybe pediatrics? I like kids."

I nodded approvingly. My hands, now resting against my thighs, felt as slick as ponchos in a rainforest. One of them darted out and grabbed my beer. I swallowed, then took the next plunge. "Hey, uh. Uh, can I go get you a drink?"

At last, she looked up. As she did, my heart sank to somewhere between my spleen and my intestines. The look she gave me was one I knew all too well.

"I'm sorry . . ." she said. She flashed that polite little smile. "I'm sorry, but . . . I don't need a drink."

That look. Goddammit. Nothing could save me now. I should have pulled out then. I should have said my farewell and lifted from the couch. As with the bald girl and her own, different smile, what would have become of me if I had done just that . . . It's unthinkable. Unimaginable.

Instead, I pressed on like some bumbling idiot. The Other Me stared on as if he were watching a gruesome car wreck play out in slow motion. "Ah," I said. "Well, that's cool. Want to go out and get some air?"

"Linus . . ." The smile. Just an upturn of the lip, sliding across even white teeth. "I'm here with my boyfriend."

It was like a mortar finally finding its mark. I shut up entirely. Had I been that transparent? Of course I had. And I had known, really, that this was coming. My jaw opened, but no sound came out. I finally managed a short, "Oh. I. Sorry." My cheeks burned hotter than the air about them. I whipped my eyes away and looked at my feet. "That's fine. Do you. Want to . . ." I cut myself off.

Car wreck.

"I better get going," Marilyn Reed whispered. I could hear that oh-so-polite, ingratiating smile in her voice. She stood from the couch and stepped across the living room. I watched her legs as she went, pumping quickly. Gaining speed. Getting a little distance between me and her. She turned and started to exit through the back door, meeting a figure halfway through. It was the man in the cap – all muscle and blunt eyes. She said something to him, glanced back at me, and the two of them disappeared out into the yard.

I groaned and let my neck go limp. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Little drunk stupid. Asshole. Loser.

I should have seen it the moment she smiled at me. She had been looking for an out the entire time we talked, but was too proper – too _polite_ – to simply blow me off. This girl had humored me up until the point she could no longer stand my awkward, fumbling attention.

Fuck.


	10. 10

**10**

I winced and let my head rest against the back of the couch. I was too hot, too itchy, and my hands suddenly ached. The glassy taste of cheap beer festered on my tongue. I lifted the sleeves of my shirt with opposite hands, scratching at my arms. Itching. Hot. So much sweat. I just wanted to leave.

"That's quite a tat you have," a voice purred from my left.

I opened my eyes slowly. My fingers still scratched subconsciously over the skin of my left arm, lifting the jersey's sleeve as they went. It took me a moment, but I realized that that voice was referring to _me_. It had flowed from the corner, where a recliner sat in shadow.

A woman sat back in the easy chair, hands curled about the front of its armrests. She wore a loose, khaki cargo pants and a dull gray tank top. Dark, naturally tanned skin shone with a pall of sweat. Her arms were exquisitely muscled. Each bicep, tricep, and deltoid stood out as if they had been carved from oak. Bodybuilder's arms. I could see the outline of her nipples, ghosting through the thin cotton of her shirt and the sports bra she wore beneath. Her shining, tussled black hair was cut short – a page boy's hair, as if from a pin-up magazine from the sixties. On one wrist, she wore a silver bracelet etched with jagged art deco designs and inset with a single polished red stone.

The angle of the lamp's light cast a ribbon of darkness across her face. I could see little of it, except for the outline of wide cheekbones and a square jaw. Her eyes were little more than coal diamond glints. A long, sly smile broke through the shadow. Among her perfect alabaster teeth, I swore that her canines stood as sharp as knife points.

Despite the heat that had dogged me the entire day and night, I shivered.

"Excuse me?" I managed.

She laughed quietly. I could just barely see her eyes move, tracing up and down my body. "I said that I like your tattoo." She gestured with a single strong hand. Her voice was smooth and husky, rolling over a gravelly edge deep in the back of her throat.

"Oh . . . thanks." I couldn't help but stare. She didn't budge a millimeter. Still as a clay statue, sweating in the corner. That strange, unnerving smile never broke. "How long have you been sitting there?" I asked.

"Long enough," the woman responded. She let off a low, growling chuckle. "I got to see you make your move on Little Miss 'Likes Kids.' Very smooth."

My head dropped back against the couch cushions. "Whatever."

"Are you a fan?" she asked.

"What?"

"A fan. Of the game. _Zelda_."

I looked back to her and winced. This again. I was too drunk for this. Or not enough. "You mean the tattoo?" I barked a single, hateful laugh. "Yeah. Of course. Why the hell would I have it if I wasn't?"

"Whoa. Calm down there, Casanova." She clucked her tongue and smoothed a hand through her hair. "I'm a fan too, you could say. My brothers and I used to play the original, back in the day."

"Yeah," I sighed. "Back in the day."

_Thump thump thump thump_. Techno drums began to roll back up from the basement.

"Must be pretty devoted to get a tattoo."

"I suppose. Seemed like a good idea at the time." I stared at the ceiling, miserable.

Her sly, sibilant voice wove across me. "I like it. It's . . . bold, a tattoo like that. Says something about the person who gets it."

"That they're a fucking geek?" I suggested. I wiped sweat away from my forehead and smeared it across the sofa.

"Maybe. Or maybe it means that they're brave, wise, and powerful. That they've devoted themselves to a power and ideal handed down by the gods themselves."

"Tch!" I chuffed. "Lady, I'm pretty drunk, but that still sounds like crap. It's a stupid tattoo, inspired by a video game. A fucking toy. What have _you _been drinking?" I growled and stood from the couch.

"It was just a thought," she said. "Leaving?"

"I need another beer."

"Oh?"

"Yes. Nice, uh, talking with you."

I watched as the woman leaned forward and stood from the chair. My breath caught for a moment, releasing itself in a slow trickle through my nostrils. Her eyes were dark as onyx. It may have been a trick of the light, but it looked as though her irises glowed at the edges like hot embers. I was surprised to find that she was shorter than I was by a few inches, but must have outweighed me by dozens of pounds. Her entire body was just as toned, shaped, and twitching as her arms. "Yes. It's been fine meeting you, Linus."

"What did you say your name was?" I managed.

"I didn't," she said. Her coal-dark eyes glittered mischievously. As she turned to leave the room I saw that unnerving smile, and once again I trembled as if from cold. In an instant, the dreamlike encounter was over.

Weird.

I shook my head.

Triple-weird.

I scooped up my cup, slowly falling apart as it was, and headed back outside. The difference in temperature, slight as it was, brought a smile to my face. One more beer, I reasoned. One more drink for the road, and then I would try to get Stuart to hustle us a ride home.

Stuart himself stood amongst the dozen or so people chatting and drinking on the patio. He leaned against the wall with his elbow, speaking to a nodding pixie girl who had to be more than a foot shorter than he was. I couldn't help but laugh to myself. The tension of Marilyn's unceremonious rejection and the bizarre encounter with the woman in the recliner began to fade away in wisps. I heard my name and looked up, only to see Stuart still talking down to the same girl.

Through the quiet din of crisscrossing conversations, I caught, " . . . yeah, Olsen. I know Olsen. I'm rooming with him right now, actually. He went here. Nice guy, but wound way too tight if you ask me." Stuart nodded gravely as he spoke.

I scowled as I bent to fill my cup once more. Wound too tight. Little more than an ooze of pus-yellow foam projected from the tap. Fuck. _Wound too tight._ I set the empty cup on the snack table and turned back through the crowd.

Fuck you, wound too tight. I saw you when you got back from Afghanistan, Stew. You want to talk about "wound too tight?" How about _un_winding completely? How about just fucking giving up? How about not holding a single job for two years? How about getting quietly shuffled over to the Reserves when they re-upped your fucking commission for Iraq, since you had gained so much weight, smoked so much pot, and injured your shins? Wound too tight, my ass.

I grimaced and shuffled over the patio, elbowing between talking couples and groups of happy drunken students. Some night this had turned into. Fuck!

As I hit the edge of the patio, unhappy at this blurry world that had set its sights on pissing on me, I heard a familiar voice out on the lawn. "Stop it – you always get this way when you drink."

It was followed by an unfamiliar one, deep but wavering: "Mary, fuck. Mary. Just tell me –"

Marilyn Reed stood with arms crossed next to the man from earlier – her boyfriend. His Raiders hat sat crumpled in the high grass next to a crushed plastic cup. "I'm going home, Bryan." She slung her purse over her shoulder and started across the lawn.

The big man, "Bryan," vaulted after her. He was like the woman who had complimented my tattoo – all muscle. Unlike her, his body was the inverted triangle shape of a man who had obsessively worked his upper torso while neglecting all other areas. His shirt strained against grotesquely magnified pectorals and biceps. He caught Marilyn by the shoulder and spun her around. "You slut!" he shouted. "Fucking whore!" He gripped her by the shoulders and shook her. Terror filled her eyes.

Behind me, I heard conversations begin to go quiet. Attentions turned and scanned out to the couple on the lawn.

"Bryan," Marilyn squeaked. "Bryan, you're scaring me. You're not rational."

He stopped shaking her, but continued yelling. "I won't . . . I won't hurt you, baby. I won't hurt you."

"Let me go."

My legs were moving.

"Just promise me . . . promise me you won't talk to . . ." Bryan slurred.

My legs were moving and the Other Me was shouting itself hoarse.

"We were just talking. Honey, please. Let me go. Come with me. Let's go." Tears in her eyes.

"I won't hurt you. Just tell me what you talked about."

"This is stupid, Bryan. You always get this way," Marilyn cried.

People were whispering behind me and my legs were moving and the Other Me sat numb, as I walked straight up to Marilyn Reed and her boyfriend, Bryan. Bryan, who had to weigh almost the same as two of me. "I think it's time you let her go," I hissed.

All but a faint, oblivious conversation went silent. The two in front of me shut up completely. They looked at me with wide, shocked eyes. I could see in Bryan's blue irises that he wasn't quite processing this new development. His big hands still rested on the shoulder hems of Marilyn's blouse.

Finally, he blurted, "What?"

"I said that you should let her go home," I said. The Surface Me seemed to finally catch up with the Other Me. I felt dread spill out into my guts like liquid nitrogen.

"Linus . . ." Marilyn whispered. Her horrified eyes darted to Bryan, then back to me. It finally dawned on me how utterly stupid this was.

"What?" Bryan repeated. Before I could answer, he spat, "What the fuck? What the . . . fuck! You're that fag she, she was talking to."

"Just let her go, man," I said. I noticed that my hands were shaking.

He did, sort of. His hands drifted from her shoulders and balled into loose fists. "Get the fuck out of my face, you queer."

I shook my head. "No. You need to sleep this off, buddy. We were just talking. She made it clear she's not interested in me."

Pleadingly, Marilyn said, "Linus. Please just go away."

"No." Despite those six beers (and that single shot), I shook from the soles of my feet to the tip of my chin. "He needs to calm down, first. He needs to let you go home."

"Or what?" Bryan scowled, then started forward suddenly. Somehow, I didn't move a muscle. "What? What are you gonna do about it?" His fists tightened.

I swallowed little but hot, dry air. I could tell that all the eyes on the patio were on me, now. "Whatever it takes," I croaked.

"Whafuck?" Bryan laughed.

"Whatever it takes," I repeated. And somehow, I meant it.


	11. 11

**11**

Bryan took another step forward. This time, I matched his movement in the opposite direction. "Get the fuck out of my face," he said.

I shook my head. Another step backward. Excited whispers behind me. I managed to keep my attention squarely on Bryan as he stalked toward me. His steps were shaky but determined. Behind him, Marilyn stood like a wide-eyed, frightened statue. Her lips trembled.

Concrete beneath my feet. I was back on the patio.

I raised my palms. "Hey man. Hey. Just calm the fuck down." In retrospect, the inclusion of "fuck" was probably not very wise.

"Yeah. Yeah." Bryan clenched and unclenched his fists as he too arrived on the patio. "Make me. Just fucking make me, you fudge packer."

I suddenly became aware that I had come as far as I could – behind me was a tight wall of partygoers. At that moment, I could have ended it quietly. I could have turned and sidled between their shoulders. They would have let me. At that point, their curiosity hadn't yet become bloodlust.

Instead, I stopped. I stared straight ahead and made sure that my eyes locked with Marilyn's. Nothing but numb terror. Something told me that she had seen this before.

"Guys. Hey now. Guys." It was Jeff Ramirez, swaying through the crowd to my left. "No need for this. Walk it off."

Closer now. Bryan continued the march apace. Just over a yard away. My hands, arms, and calf muscles felt somehow numb, as if they had been shot up with an extra-strong dose of novocaine.

Bryan scowled and screwed up his face. "Just. Just stay out of this, Jeff."

People were talking again. Whispers swam through the assembled crowd.

I saw Jeff pull himself through the goggling throng and into the unoccupied portion of the patio. Unoccupied, that was, but for Bryan and myself. Just me and Bryan, Jeff ambling beside us like some half-assed referee. The crowd behind me might as well have been a thousand miles away. I suddenly felt like I had stepped into an old John Ford western. My fingers twitched and curled just above my belt loops. John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Yul Brynner. Showdown.

"Come on. Bryan." Jeff still had a glass of dark liquor in one hand. He smiled broadly and waved it to Bryan. "Don't do this, man. He's just . . ." he seemed to struggle to find the words, "just a little drunk and a little concerned." Jeff paused. A look – the kind I associate with finding a piece of clamshell in your chowder – crossed his face. He was drunk too. Fine conversation, this. He stepped closer to Bryan. "He's not worth it. Remember back in May? That was, was bad shit. Bad business. You don't want that again. He's just, just a skinny drunk nerd. Not worth it."

Et tu, Jeff Ramirez?

"Fuck. Fuck you, Jeff. Get the fuck out of my way." Bryan's lips pulled back over his teeth like a baboon's.

I tried to ignore Jeff's insult. I tried, in my way, to defuse the situation. "Listen to him," I said. Loser. He was right. About everything. Not worth it. Not worth it! "Just fucking go away. Before . . . before somebody gets hurt."

Lord, I was bad at this.

Bryan charged.

Reflexes like rusting brake pads. I saw Bryan coming, saw Jeff stumble backward out of his path. I saw Marilyn's hands clutch futilely at her face, a scream contorting her lips. I saw the partygoers jumping and shouting, starting to run sideways to get a better view. I saw the weak torches at the edge of the patio, casting their bleak ritual light. I saw three women and two men struggling out of the pool in varying stages of undress. I saw all of this as if I was watching a film with every fifth frame removed. Reality jumped and stuttered like a mad thing.

The first punch landed square in my belly. I felt my muscles clench as it struck, bright static pain shooting out through my abdomen. Air rushed from my lungs and spat awkwardly through my lips. I folded forward.

Snapping back: The world tilted left and right. Bryan, fists raised and teeth clenched. My abdominal muscles flexed painfully.

I moved.

My feet swished beneath me, skitter-stepping sideways. He followed me with big clomping steps. Screwing back his shoulder, he prepared another punch.

"Bryan!" Marilyn's voice. Scared. Terrified.

I moved. I moved and danced as he punched, clumsily hitting nothing. No time to think. I raised a feeble arm and punched back, clipping his shoulder. My knuckles skipped off muscle and bone like a flat rock over the surface of a lake.

Bryan growled, grabbed my outstretched arm, and pulled me toward him. I connected with his extended fist like a runaway car striking a concrete pylon. I made a terrible, pathetic sound. I managed to pull away and slap out, striking his cheek with the edge of my hand. I might as well have thumped him with a ruler – all the semi-blow provoked was another wordless cry of rage.

My feet propelled me back. He hooked a hand at me and missed. I hooked back. The same result. My head and gut and arms pounded with might have been pain and might have been adrenaline.

And suddenly Bryan's great bony fist was shooting forward. Less than a second. My feet tangled. I met it head on.

Black holes spread through my vision. The world plummeted backward. My skull rattled; my teeth scraped against one another; I could feel tears seeping from an eye. That was it. I was done. I had just enough time for the Other Me to anticipate the sensation of my head impacting the cement.

Blackness.

A large pair of hands slapped into my shoulders.

A voice – _familiar_ – cooed, "You've taken tae kwon do, haven't you?"

I opened my eyes. I wasn't on the concrete. The world came to me at an angle. Those strong, confident hands pressed me forward, and I could see that they were propping me up. Everything buzzed at the edges. I blinked and watched dancing spots recede into the distance. Bryan seethed, no more than six or seven feet away.

"What?" I managed.

She entered my field of vision from the left, bending down and speaking in calm tones. All around her were confused, curious, and anxious faces, bent to get a better look. "Your movement. You've learned tae kwon do."

It was the nameless woman from earlier. All dark bronze skin and strange burning eyes. She smiled as if what she saw was a simple, unassailable thing of pleasure.

My daze was passing. The blow to my left eye had nearly knocked me out. "Uh. Yeah. Like, up through seventh grade." I shook my head and tried to regain some sense of balance.

"You're faster than him," she whispered.

"I'm also drunk," I observed.

"Doesn't matter. He's drunk, too. I've watched you both. Your movements will be looser, harder, less restrained. Concentrate on those tae kwon do movements, but _not the attacks_. Understand?"

"COME BACK HERE, YOU PRICK," Bryan intoned. Less than thirty seconds had passed since his punch had landed and spilled me back into the arms of the crowd.

"No," I answered, half to Bryan and half to the woman holding me by the shoulders.

"Move your feet like you're practicing . . ."

"But," I whined, "I haven't practiced in years."

"Fucking concentrate," she growled in my ear. "Move like that to dodge. Then _jab_, hard. None of that elbow-chop, roundhouse kick bullshit. It'll work."

I didn't think that it would. No matter.

I felt the mysterious, muscled woman, that dark-haired ingénue, nuzzle against the back of my neck. Her lips brushed my ponytail as they parted in a smile. "Good luck, hero."

Suddenly, I was propelled upward from behind, feet shuffling awkwardly across concrete. And there I was again, standing face to face with Bryan. Big, linebacker Bryan. His fists swung limply at his sides as he came forward, closing the gap between us. He raised his right fist again, slow and deliberate and drunk.

Move your feet. Shuffle. Shuck. Dodge.

The world slid past me in a tilting blur. I felt my feet dance to the left. I thought of mirrored gyms, dojos, Bruce Lee, loose white uniforms, and Korean barbecue.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as Bryan's punch sailed past my right ear. Somewhere in the assembled crowd, someone gasped.

Marilyn's voice, again: "Stop it!"

Slow, slurring, to my right: "Fuck!"

I pivoted on a heel, felt my arms go loose at the shoulders. The muscles along my forearms tightened; my knuckles clamped together and drew back. Elsewhere, more yelling – idiot babble in my blood-pounding ears.

Bryan was slouched beside me. I stabbed forward and brought my knuckles into his cheek.

Shit!

Dull, vibrating pain shot up my arm. It was like punching a side of beef. The blow snapped his head to the side, spittle spraying off his lips, glittering with torchlight.

At once, he was moving again. Barely phased. His bulk rushed up at me, and again I shuffled-stepped backward. The drunk, swimming feeling was joined by the crash of adrenaline, like howling static in my limbs. The two sensations twisted about one another, and in that moment it felt as if my body left my control. That Other Me – the Me who sat and stared out my eye sockets, shaking his head and groaning with disappointment – was all I had. Everything else was Someone, Not Me, a curious horrible ghost that possessed my body. Ripped with alcohol and adrenaline, all I could do was watch my body move of its own accord.

Bryan threw another sloppy punch, skimming air where my face had been seconds ago. I jabbed back, connecting with nothing, and moved forward. His glassy blue eyes showed something like concern now – concern that this was not going as well as he had planned. I punched again, connecting with his sternum. Again, stinging pain skittered up my arm. Bryan made a weak sound ("Boof") and fell back a bit. He seemed to hesitate.

I heard Marilyn again. "I swear to God, I'll call the cops! Bryan! Bryan!"

Behind her voice was Stuart's, bellowing like a bull ox. "KICK ASS!"

Neither was helping.

Bryan took the moment to swing hard, spinning his entire torso forward with the movement. His knuckles caught me in the left arm. Though horribly timed, the power behind the blow shifted all of my weight to the left. My arm went numb. Shards of glass scraped across my shoulder blades.

As bad as I hurt in that moment, my body was still running beyond my control. I spun with the momentum of the punch. My right elbow locked and speared out as I went, catching Bryan square in the nose. I felt the jutting bone impact, sinking past skin and crushing cartilage. I vaguely heard a disconcerting sound - something like _squitch_. The elbow came away hot and wet. Bryan screamed.

I caught my balance. Bryan bent down beside me like an arthritic old man. He cupped his hands over his face, rivulets of red streaming between his fingers. Good. Good. Maybe he'll stop now. Give up.

"Sonf of a bitf!" Bryan choked. He recoiled upward, tearing his hands away from his face. Blood splattered out and over the cement beneath our feet. It ran from his nose and over his lips, staining his teeth a mottled pink. I could already see the ugly purple line where the bone had broken. His eyes bulged in their sockets.

Shaking, stumbling, Bryan howled. Blood poured from his nostrils and over his tongue. His legs shot into a dead sprint. His bulk rushed toward me like a cannonball.

My entire body coiled as he came. Every bit of force I could muster pistoned up through my arm. I leapt forward to meet him.

The flat of my right palm smashed into his chin. Every tendon and ligament screamed with the blow, jumping backward like car shocks.

Bryan's feet left the ground. His eyes rolled back in his head. My momentum carried me past him, but I had just enough time to see his body go horizontal just before it rushed to meet the cement.

I slid to a stop and spiraled about, ready for the next assault. The breath roared in and out of my chest, burning as it went. Sweat rolled over my eyelids and stung tender, pulverized flesh.

Bryan lay in a heap on the patio cement. Liquid crimson pooled on the cleft of his upper lip. His eyes were closed, and his breath wheezed in and out between parted teeth. Out cold.

My breath caught. It was over.

Somewhere, I think someone cheered.


	12. 12

**12**

"Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod."

I felt a twinge. A shallow spasm spread through my guts. I hurt.

A fleeting panicked form rushed past me.

"Bryan Bryan oh god, Jesus. Someone call an ambulance please _Bryan_."

I bent double, felt the twinge again. There. Right there. In the belly. Shock lines still radiated from the spot where Bryan's first punch had found its mark. There was suddenly motion all around me – feet and arms and the swishing of loose clothes. Someone's loud, excited, "Woo!" echoed over the lawn.

I saw stars in the distance. They were out of focus.

I shuffled awkwardly, coughed, and fell to my knees with a jolt. Hurt. Coughed again.

It was Marilyn, crying and yelling. "Call 911! Pleasepleaseplease just . . ."

I vomited. Somehow, I had maneuvered myself so that none of it hit the cement – all of the night's drinking and cursory eating ended up in the grass. The smell of Keystone Light, semi-digested ham, and rancid bile wafted up out of the lawn in a hot cloud of stink. I burped, tasted beer and the sharp tang of stomach acid.

"Ewww!" A shrill voice out on the lawn. Oh, come on. You don't even have to smell it.

An arm looped around mine and tugged insistently. After a moment, Stuart's slow, even voice whispered, "Hey buddy. C'mon. You okay?"

Beside him, I could hear Jeff speaking in clipped, excited tones. "You guys need to go."

"I know, Jeff."

"Right now. Ramon's already out front. Pick him up and leave. Please. I don't need this." As if he was trying to talk under his breath, but failing, Jeff hissed, "Stupid. Fucking idiot nearly got himself killed. You saw Bryan break that guy's arm . . ."

"_I know_," Stuart said. He lifted with more force now, hauling me to my feet.

"I'm all right," I sputtered. "I can walk by myself. Just a little dizzy." No lie, that. My ears rang and the horizon seemed to slosh back and forth like a wave machine. I wiped the back of a trembling hand across my lips, pulling away the last gooey streamers of puke. Other than that, it had been a clean bit of barfing – I probably wouldn't even smell of it after a few minutes of air.

I turned back to the patio. Many of the guests were shuffling about the edges, away from the two figures sprawled in the center. The others had either disappeared into the house or migrated out to the lawn. They all jabbered excitedly in the dingy torchlight.

Marilyn knelt in the empty center of the patio, sobbing. She ran her fingers through Bryan's short, messy hair. She had stopped yelling for help. Her entire attention sat squarely on the man I had just knocked out.

For a moment, my attention drifted past them. My eyes slid over the human fence of jittery partygoers that partially blocked the open door into the house. Dull orange light poured out past their heads and shoulders.

Inside the door, standing at the edge of the lower living room, was the nameless woman. She gestured wildly, speaking fast. Her eyes were alight with fervent excitement.

I could just barely make out the figure that she talked to. He stood half-concealed by the frame of the sliding glass door, his upper torso arched back slightly. Whoever he was, he wore a suit so black and svelte that it seemed to shine. His tie was the same color as the blood drying on Bryan's lips. Skinny, tight-tendoned hands flexed and relaxed spasmodically as the nameless woman spoke. For a moment, his broad chest twitched with unheard laughter. I caught a glimpse of a sharp chin and a restrained, toothy grin.

And then the man in the suit was gone, literally disappearing between blinks. The nameless woman lingered a moment. She looked back out into the back yard and caught my eye. Again, I swore that the edges of her irises shone like amber fire. She winked.

Then she too was gone, exiting the living room with big, measured steps.

Bryan groaned. His eyelids fluttered.

"_Come on_," Stuart said. Harder this time.

I snapped back to attention. Yes. Matters at hand. I bent forward and addressed the pair crumpled on the cement. "Marilyn. You can go home now." I felt a little spark of triumph in my chest.

Her entire body contorted as she whipped back to face me. Marilyn's eyes narrowed, the flesh around them red and puffy. Cheeks clammy with tears, she choked, "Get the fuck away from me, you psycho!"

"What."

Voice rising, pitch warbling, Marilyn bleated, "He was just jealous! He, he would have let me go home! You fucking loser – I hope you go to fucking prison for this!" She sniffled. "GO AWAY!"

Nothing accomplished. My triumph died quietly. An empty emotional silence took its place. No. Nothing gained. No help.

I turned and trudged back into the house. Her accusing eyes followed after me. They burned at my back, long after I blindly rambled out the front door and into the waiting backseat of Ramon's SUV. Gusts of icy air conditioning fondled my sweat-coated skin. Ramon glanced back at me with emotionless eyes. As ever, he said nothing.

As Stuart snapped his seatbelt into place, Jeff leaned in through the passenger-side door with a worried expression. "Listen," he said. "I think it would be a good idea if he –"

"I'm right here, Jeff," I said. I winced my eyes shut. Needles danced about my left eye, up and down my cheekbone and forehead.

"Right." Jeff's voice turned exhausted and wrung through with tension. "I think it'd be better if you don't come around here for a while. Bryan Jones has a lot of friends. He, he gets this way, you know? And you just have to let him walk it off. You didn't have to fight him."

"But –"

Jeff cut me off, "I don't care. You need to be, y'know, better at these things. You fucked this up. I wouldn't be surprised if the cops show up at your place with a warrant. Assault."

I groaned, "He started it." I felt like I was in fifth grade again, lined up against the brick wall with a split lip and bloody nose.

"Whatever. Doesn't matter." To Stuart: "Be careful, bro. You're welcome back."

I heard the door slam shut. The truck shifted gears and we were away. Home again, home again.

The night flowed past us. Road noise and vague flashing light enshrouded me. My brain ached.

After a time, I spoke without opening my eyes. "Do either of you know the woman that caught me during the fight?"

A few seconds passed. Stuart tentatively said, "No. I was going to ask you the same question. Should've asked Jeff if he knew her."

I assumed that Ramon's silence meant that he in fact did not know her either.

"Must have been a friend of a friend," I grunted.

The rest of the drive home fell into neon-tinged silence.

You fucking loser –

He's just a skinny drunk nerd.

Linus. Please just go away.

I'm sorry . . . but I don't need a drink.

You fucking loser –

GO AWAY!

A sick, miserable sensation. There. Right there. Behind the spot where the first punch had landed.

There.

Right there.

You fucking loser –

Stop it. You're just making it worse.

Old thoughts and memories crashed against the new words. Mom, phoning to say that she was moving to Florida with Roger. The blue-gray glow of x-rays. Hurried chattering, grimaces, the blunt smell of disinfectant. Word salad. Seizures. Late nights and caffeine shakes. Magenta-tinged street glow. A funeral with no clouds or rain – a beautiful day to watch sallow-eyed men lower my father's coffin into sandy California earth. Hot sun on the collar of a black suit. Lira's tearless blue eyes. A Christmas card with a pine tree on the front.

Old images. Nothing new. Just old bits that kept raining through my mind, over and over. Just as the new words echoed and echoed.

When we arrived, I spared not a single word on thanking Ramon for the ride. I awkwardly tumbled out the SUV and toward the apartment. I could hear Stuart conversing with him quietly as I rounded the sidewalks and raced toward the apartment door. Muted night sounds accompanied my hurried movements.

It suddenly occurred to me, some half an hour after leaving the party, that Allen had not accompanied us home. Strange. Perhaps Lacey had gotten a hold of him after all.

I entered the apartment and lurched into my bedroom without even bothering to check if Stuart was behind me. The doors shut quietly. I removed my shoes and careened onto my bed. As I fell, my head pulsed with dull fire.

Drenched in shadow and twilight, I crawled to the corner of my bed and opened the glass door to the cabinet before me. I unrolled a sharp-edged controller, turned on the television, and stabbed a rigid finger into a button. The screen flashed white.

Reverberating, tinny music tolled like a bizarre chorus of bells. A title, overlaid across the flashing counterpart of my tattoo: _The Legend of Zelda_. The original.

I lay back down on my bed and began to play. I had done the same so many times that it was almost automatic.

Fucking loser –

My eye stung and twitched. Bruised flesh ached in spots across my body.

He's just a skinny drunk nerd.

My thumbs slid across the buttons. Old familiar movements. Onscreen, the tiny crouched Link scouted about pixilated rocks and forests.

Loser.

My own words now.

Nothing. A loser. A creep.

Nothing you have done or ever will do will be worth anything. You are nothing. You are a wraith. A shadow man. You are a shadow.

I played until my eyelids became heavy. The screen disappeared once, twice. Stone blinks. And at last, chased by my own judgment, the controller fell from my hands. I descended into sleep.


	13. 13

**13**

I was falling.

How odd.

My dreams had never been as explicit and vividly sensory as this. They had a tendency to be visual, wandering things in which I found myself completely detached from what I saw: Great galleries and concert halls; vaulted, echoing ceilings; palaces full of arches, pillars, and etched columns. Sinuous nomad forms darted between monolithic structures. Points of light glittered upon twilight skylines of spires and pearlescent towers.

Of course, I had nightmares. And I had dreamt of falling before.

Tonight was different.

I could feel cool wind rush past me, arms outstretched and hair flowing behind me. The whoosh and swish of air cutting about my clothes filled my ears. Dizzy momentum splashed against my eardrums. I sensed freefall.

Something soft and wet slapped against my cheek. The tepid moisture lingered.

Very real, this.

The tingling-terrified sensation of freefall squeezed my intestines and shrank my testicles away from my thighs.

Too real.

Something slammed into my chest. As big around as a strong man's arm and completely unyielding; every bit of breath fled from my lungs. A heavy iron bar of bright pain wrapped about and constricted my ribs. I tumbled away, spinning, no orientation. Everything whirled about me.

My eyes shot open. I gasped; a lightning bolt of agony burst across my chest.

I saw green.

I fell.

Green and gray and sharp earthy brown, twisting past in a blurred whirlwind.

Impact.

I landed before I even knew there was something to land on. Flailing and spinning, my internal radar didn't register the ground rushing up to meet me.

My body flopped awkwardly through warm, spongy matter with a soft _squish_. I sank into fleshy depths. My eyes clamped shut, unwilling to face the inevitable. There was a quiet, insistent rustling. I stopped.

Stillness. I felt buried in a blanket of cool, moist quiet.

Another gasp: I took a deep heady breath that summoned a line of fire down my chest. A halfhearted, pitiful moan whistled between my teeth.

My eyes opened on their own accord, blinking furiously.

Shapes and colors resolved themselves slowly. A haze of mottled greens and grays parted into lines and thick tangles.

I lay in the burnished twilight of a great forest. Gnarled trunks and branches spread above me, twisting off into a shadow-laden sea of leaves. Winding vines and creepers snaked across the empty spaces between trees and clung tightly to gray pillars of bark. Giant roots spread in labyrinthine bunches, disappearing into a riot of rippling mulch and undergrowth.

A deep blanket of dead and dying leaves covered my arms, legs, and torso. Long, brittle fronds and fleshy, freshly fallen greenery brushed against my skin. Crushed fragments sticky with sap stuck between my fingers.

I sniffed. A scent like a cool pond in summer wafted up my nostrils.

My ribs ached.

I rose slowly. Every sensation pounded against me like drumbeats – through my pupils, against my eardrums, over my tongue, across my skin. Fallen leaves trickled from the sleeves of my shirt and detached from the hair along my arms. As I stood, I could feel the lingering sea-bound tilt of the night's alcohol. I reached back and brushed thick leaves from my hair.

I stood there for a moment, still numb. I stared off into the shrouded distance, taking it all in without grasping a bit of it.

Pale light fell in ghostly shafts through uneven holes in the canopy. Other than that, the tangle of branches, vines, and greenery was an absolute barrier. Shadows reigned.

A low, thin haze swam between the trees. Brief puffs and eddies of warm, wet breeze curled about my skin and capered between fat, shining leaves. The air smelled sweetly of warm wet soil and slow vegetable rot. High above, there was a beat of heavy wings . . . then airy, expectant silence.

Very real. Too real.

For the space of about a minute, my brain refused to process any of this. I saw it, but did not understand it. My brain sat vapor-locked, struggling, cognitive processes sputtering. Dreaming. I was dreaming. Logic, therefore, was suspended. At any moment the trees would melt into stone pillars and the sky would crisscross with Roman arches of white marble.

They did not.

No. Not dreaming. What, then? I nodded to myself; leaves and creepers slid past with half-drunken disdain. Not dreaming at all.

Finally, the question slipped past my lips. "Where am I?" I spoke those words to no one, and received no response. Only the murmur of tepid breeze answered me. All else was awfully, completely quiet.

Oh God. Oh God. Where was I? I was awake. Had to be. Too real to be dreaming. So where in ever-living hell was I? I stood frozen in place, fingers curled toward my open palms. I licked my lips and tasted sweat.

My eyes began to adjust to the half-dark spaces between the wide tree trunks. I could just make out the immense bases of even larger trees – great shiny gray expanses of glossy roots and bark. I was reminded of redwoods and baobabs.

That was it.

Someone had drugged me. Yes. Had to be it. Bryan, or some of his friends. Somehow, someway, they had drugged me, thrown me in a car, and tossed me off the highway somewhere near the Oregon border. Yes. Yes! I sighed with strange relief. They had dumped me in the rainforest. It was a prank. Juvenile revenge.

I turned and placed my hand on the trunk of the nearest tree. The bark was as smooth and even as rippled ceramic.

Of course. Drugged. Makes sense.

No it doesn't.

My brow furrowed. How would they have gotten into the apartment? How would they have administered the drug? How could they have gotten past Stuart? Maybe he was in on it. I made an ass of his brother so . . . No. Stop it. Idiot thoughts. None of that made sense.

I took another breath of earthy, wet air. No idea what time it was – the light was too strange and ambiguous. Still slightly drunk. How could I still be drunk after a drive all the way up the length of California? Perhaps it was an effect of the drugging. Shut up.

The more I thought about it, the less any of it made sense. I placed both palms on the tree, as if to steady myself.

Did it really matter? I was someplace strange and foreign. At the very least, I needed to look for some way back to civilization. Hopefully, I could stumble east or west and find a highway. Then it was a simple hitched ride to a phone, then a call back to Stuart. Hell, if I was deep enough in Oregon, I could call my sister and have her pick me up. Then . . . well, then ol' Bryan and his goon friends would have the devil to pay.

I started moving, shuffling through rich piles of leaves and over lichen-covered logs. Which way was west? No sun; just anemic twilight. What was the old saw about the direction moss grew on trees? In that moment, I wished that I could remember a single thing from the Boy Scouts. I walked deeper into the woods, trying to keep to one direction. The gloom intensified.

Something moved out in the dark.


	14. 14

**14**

I stopped. My heart thundered. Head cocked, I listened carefully.

Nothing.

Only silent, swimming mist and gray shadows.

Were there bears in these woods? Cougars? I had visions of rednecks charging from between the trees, lead pipes in hand and eyeballs spinning with meth.

Still nothing – only the distant chatter of trembling leaves and swaying branches.

How deep into this forest had they taken me? Roads and highways crisscrossed the redwood forests. At the very least, I should have been able to hear the sound of far-off motors. Even if they had hiked into one of the national parks and dumped me off a trail, there should have been some sign of human passing. A discarded plastic cup, children's laughter, a plane droning somewhere overhead, a pile of dogshit nestled up against a log.

I began walking again.

For that matter, why was it so utterly quiet? The few times I had passed through the forests of northern California and Oregon, they had been alive with birdsong. I should have heard the raucous arguments of crows and the scuttling chatter of squirrels and chipmunks. Other than that brief wing beat that had sounded high in the trees, I saw and heard no evidence of any animals whatsoever. Besides the plants and an occasional red and white mushroom cap, the forest felt as unliving as a catacomb.

I looked up at a passing hole in the canopy of leaves. The light that seeped through it was vague, gray, and seemingly without source. I cupped a hand over my eyes and examined it. I saw only more leaves and tree limbs, filtering the distant sun down to this sallow witchglow.

Where the hell was I?

The column of light subsumed back into half-darkness.

I trudged forward in near-silence for a time, accompanied only by wisps of mist and my own semi-drunken thoughts. I nursed a growing, itching need to piss until I could no longer stand the sensation. After positioning myself in the shadow of one of the smaller trees I had come across – still easily the size of a full-grown oak – I unzipped and let loose a jet of dark yellow against its bark. I sighed with momentary relief.

Behind me, something crashed loudly through dead leaves.

I cut off mid-stream, breath jumping, penis and dangling balls shrinking inward like a panicked tortoise retreating into its shell. A single drop of urine fell from my shriveling tip and disappeared into the mulch at my feet. I stood unmoving. Paralyzed.

Whatever it was shuffled quickly through the mounds of dead leaves and sticks. I heard its course through the underbrush, some zigzagging path that brought it closer to my back . . . Then farther away. Closer. Then farther. _Click-a-click-a-click_. A curious, insistent noise reached my ears. Then more rustling in the brush. It drew farther away, faded, then stopped altogether.

A breath sucked past my trembling lips. I slowly tucked my genitals back into my pants and zipped them away. It was only with great strength of will that I managed to turn around.

I found myself confronted by: Nothing. The gloom. Trees as big around as submarines. That low, swimming mist. Nothing.

A thought, a terrible and mischievous little idea, crept into my head. A little over two years prior, I had purchased from Allen a single tab of LSD. It had been the first time I had met him, leaning with his shoulders against a corner in Stuart's Burbank apartment. I had been terribly stoned at the time – barely coherent enough to sit straight, much less hold an intelligent conversation. Somehow, I managed to extract my wallet and exchange a handful of bills for a single tiny square of paper in a plastic bag. I accomplished this via means I still don't entirely remember.

I ingested that square of paper a week later and proceeded to lose a weekend. The first day I remember only vaguely, a series of true nightmare images layered over moments of sweating, weeping lucidity. I had heard acid trips were like dreaming awake; as it turns out, this is not the case. At least, it wasn't for me. I've already written about my dreams, so a refresher isn't necessary.

What I saw during my ill-conceived acid trip was by turns exhilarating and terrifying. It's all very fuzzy, even now. Some images are burned into my brain like scratches on film emulsion. Most sit half-remembered and half-forgotten, passing through my imagination like whispering shadows.

My father, sitting in the corner with a book of recipes in his lap, nodding as if in time to some unheard music.

Grim faces sliding through the wall plaster, mouthing silent accusations.

Eyes that opened in the moon, glittering with terrible fury.

Colors that slid and danced about the air, taking unnamable shapes as they came and went.

Blood had poured from faucets and spilled out onto the tile floor. The tiles screamed as the blood washed over them.

I considered all this as I stood there in the palpable shade of that great tree. I reached out and slid a finger across the smooth bark of one of its roots. It felt very real as it passed beneath my fingerprints.

It had also felt very real when a disembodied brain, eyestalks swaying curiously, had oozed past my cheek and disappeared through my bedroom wall.

Oh God. Oh Jesus.

What triggered a flashback? I had heard so many stories, most second or third-hand, of old hippies who had thrown away their hemp jewelry and donned suits and ties . . . Only to have a day at the office interrupted by a chemical blast from the past. Something about the residual elements lingering in the spinal fluid, rushing up to meet the brain in a moment of relieved pressure. Was that really possible? Did it even make sense?

Then there were the other stories, those pause-for-thought tales that were passed along to sixth graders in grim tones. Stories about the men and women who had taken a single dose of hallucinogens and ended up spending the rest of their lives drooling and staring into space. Even if thoseanecdotes were embellished or entirely false, I knew from experience that overuse of those drugs led to dark things. About a year before my father died, an acquaintance – a DJ by trade – had embarked on a six-month bender of LSD, mescaline, psychotropic mushrooms, and pure MDMA. By the time the police took him raving from a 7-11 parking lot, he had phoned me twice and spoken to me frankly about the alien cyborgs that were attempting to harvest his liver. When I saw him next, he had lost at least thirty pounds and was on five years of probation. His hands shook whenever he lit his cigarettes.

And there _I _was. Standing in the midst of a seemingly endless forest, after drifting off to sleep in suburban Los Angeles. Looking at a landscape draped with improbable vines and full of the kind of trees described only in legends. It looked real. It smelled and even tasted real.

But so had that flying brain.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

I trembled. Where was I, really? In my room, staring at the ceiling? In some park, babbling and clutching at my hair? Already in an asylum's isolation ward?

_Click-a-click-a-click._

That same curious, insistent sound. Right above me. I felt humid air against my exposed tongue and teeth. My breath caught and rattled somewhere at the base of my throat. I looked up.

It was hard to make out at first. Just a long shape, muted against the dark hulk of the tree trunk. Then it moved, and I could see the fine details – about five or six feet long, big around as a healthy cat, and bristling with chitinous legs. It proceeded down the face of the tree with distinct undulating movements. _Click-a-click?_ The sound was a question now, rising at the end as if asking for directions.

I took a single subconscious step backwards.

It lifted its top half outward, pulling a long body until only its back legs clung to the tree trunk. This thing, this great tree-dwelling centipede _thing_, rose up and out, until I literally stared at it face to face. Its mouth – a black pit of jagged pincers – worked feverishly, as if chewing on some nonexistent, half-remembered meal. The glossy brown of its exoskeleton reminded me of polished mahogany.

_Click-a-click-a? _it asked.

Two long, slender antennae uncurled from behind shining black compound eyes. They probed outward, swaying like reeds in a creek current. I felt one of them caress my temple, soft and pliant as the bottom of a cat's paw.

I felt my eyelids wrench wider. I finally exhaled, the breath whistling out between my parted lips.

The centipede flinched backward, arching its segmented body just behind its primeval head. Its antennae straightened and twitched. They vibrated as if struggling to pick up some distant signal. Suddenly, its eyes – those dead black orbs – began to glow a slow, misty green. Shimmering patches of green luminescence spread down the length of the centipede's body.

All in response to my presence. In response to my breath. It had . . . _smelled_ me.

Too much. Too much!

I broke. My feet skittered out from beneath me, propelling me backwards through the dunes of dead leaves. The centipede jerked back in kind, made an offended _click-click! _and retreated to the vertical surface of its tree. The bioluminescent spots along its shell flared momentarily, and then winked out.

I moaned as I turned away from the tree and the huge arthropod clinging to its side. As when I had fought Bryan, my feet seemed to separate from my body and propel themselves blindly forward. My arms flailed at my sides. I picked up speed, tearing away from that _thing_, that glowing giant centipede and its feelers. I ran, no direction needed, just _away_, please God _away_. Let this be an acid flashback. Let me wake up in a park fountain or a police drunk tank. Please oh please.

I vaulted logs and crashed through bushes with round, succulent leaves. My breath accordioned in and out, in and out; each intake drew a hot finger of agony down my chest. And still I ran. Drowning thought, adrenaline dumping into my heart.

A whirl of glowing green swept past me in the inky depths. In the distance I heard something crash through the trees with the deep timbre of taiko drums. Light and shadow bled together until there was nothing but a painful twilight. Banks of mist parted before me like crowds of worshippers before a saint.

And still I ran.

Then my foot landed on something solid. Everything beneath my shoes had up to that point yielded, pulling me back, as if the forest bottom wanted to impede and engulf me. This felt like stone . . . or concrete. My momentum propelled me forward a few more steps before I could stop. The tortured movement of my breathing continued to pour pain in a thin river down my ribs.

Oh please Jesus let there be a road beneath my feet.

There wasn't. At first, I thought that I had come upon some kind of rock outcropping. I stood on a slab of pitted white stone. Tiny pools of water collected in the cracks and holes across its surface. A bed of fine green moss crept over one of its corners. I stared down at it, not understanding.

It was only when I looked up, _really _looked up, that it came to me. About twenty feet to my right was another eroded chunk of flat alabaster stone. It protruded from the deadfall about it at an awkward angle. Beyond that was an even larger slab of the same material.

To my left, leaning at a seventy degree angle, was a broken pillar. Long ago, it had been carved with intricate and flowing designs. Now, it was worn so deep that those designs were illegible ghosts.

Ruins.

There are no ruins in Oregon.

I almost laughed. Almost.

My mind began to clear. The panic-haze of adrenaline and endorphins faded. My heart slowed. I coaxed my lungs to quiet. All the same, my ribs still throbbed.

I stepped off the slab beneath my feet and settled back into the layer of dead vegetation. All around me, the forest spread, as if into forever. A small hillock led down from my position into a tangle of low-lying creepers and vines. Nestled in this miniature valley was an uncanny sight – a huge stone head, easily the size of a VW Beetle. Time and rain had scrubbed away its better features. I could tell that it had once been wide-eyed, thin-lipped, and nearly as round as a bowling ball. It reminded me of those South American statues, from the tribe whose name I can never remember. Inca? Mixtec? Toltec? One of those. Whatever.

I tilted my head, staring at the stone construction in wonder. It regarded me with its worn, flat eyes. I squinted. It was wearing a headband, circlet, or some sort of headdress. There were designs carved there, just as had been on the pillar . . . I stepped closer.

Above me, something crashed through the brush. My body stilled. It came closer. Heavy, smashing footsteps. I looked to the edge of the bowl in the land, where a stand of strange bushes stood. The leaves began to shake noticeably. Then they parted, and it was all I could do to suppress a scream at the figure that stepped through.


	15. 15

**15**

It was a hunched thing; all folds of pinkish-gray flesh that spilled from the cracks in its makeshift armor. It snorted and wheezed as it shuffled from the bushes and onto the leaf-strewn slope of the bowl. The creature's movements were cautious and halting, as if it weren't quite sure what to make of me. It proceeded down the curve of the hill awkwardly, sometimes swaying or staggering over an uneven piece of ground. At once, an almost obscene stink – like shit caked under a boot heel and left in the sun – struck at my nostrils.

I stumbled backward and nearly fell. That premature scream of surprise died in my throat, becoming a saliva-wrapped rattle. Though my initial terror never left me, I suddenly had time to examine this newcomer in full.

Its armor, made up of ragged and rust-laden plates of iron, seemed to hang together only by the faintest of miracles. The sagging, mottled skin of the thing was patched with filth and little, bristling black hairs. A hunched back was higher than its lumpy face. Jowls hung beside its cracked lips and open, panting mouth. It had a hog's nose – long and blunt, with gaping nostrils. Snot seeped out and over its lips. It stared at me with dull, sunken yellow eyes. A sickly, gray-green crust spread away from the edges of those eyes, caked on like drying toxic waste. One of its ears came to a point that flopped over the side of its head; the other was little more than a snarl of ugly white scar tissue.

In all, it exuded a sort of soft, fatted putrescence. As it drew closer, the expanding shit-reek rasped up my nose and about the back of my throat.

It held in its hands – three-fingered and stubby as old sausages – a short, crude axe. The weapon's chipped edge was fashioned from the same warped iron as its owner's armor.

This thing, this sick shuffling abomination, made a sound that was half moan and half mewling, porcine squeal. The breeze shifted, and I could smell the jagged-toothed rot of its breath layered over the rank sewer smell of its body. My head swam. I slipped back and gagged in the same movement.

I'm not exactly sure where my mind was in that moment. Fruitlessly, I attempted to classify the thing before me, to even _justify _it. My brain raced, grabbing like some weeping child at idea after broken idea. Inbred mutant animal genetic experiment alien monster monster _monster _MONSTER. I fought against the oncoming tide of fear-borne adrenaline that had washed away all thought and reason when I had run from the centipede creature. But! But, that had been familiar, in some abstract sense . . . Familiar in that it at least _resembled _something that I had seen before. Yes, its form was magnified and its behavior bizarre . . . But this . . .

What _was _this?

The pig-thing's blunt jaw sprang open. It issued a thin, excited howl, and I thought suddenly of a sow setting upon a feed trough.

Past the stand of brush, a chorus of warbling voices rose to meet it.

And there it was: The pulsing, liquid-lightning sensation of overwhelming panic. Conscious thought drowned in an ocean of popping static. Pure flight. A reduction to meat, chemicals, and snapping nerves.

There was still enough left in my head to see the pig-thing lunge forward, raising its axe with both of its misshapen hands. It snarled as it came. Behind it, the underbrush shook with oncoming movement. Forms advanced through leaves and branches. The axe dropped.

I was already in motion.

A ragged vacuum swept past my shoulder as I turned. Missed. Thank God thank god now run just run. The panic – sweet electric red panic – sparked through my limbs and pumped my still-sore legs. It took only a moment to dash up the slope to the ruined flats of white stone. My feet found purchase on solid ground. Within seconds, I was off again.

Behind me, I heard growls of frustrated pursuit. Those same heavy, loping steps through the mulch quickened and spread out.

The chunks of flagstone thinned out, growing smaller and smaller as I ran their length. I paid attention to nothing but their porcelain edges, timing each dash and jump to land along them. Some sat flat and even as sidewalks; others jutted from the undergrowth like fangs. I avoided the latter, hoping blindly with each running jump that I wouldn't mistime or bungle a landing. I imagined my ankle snapping with the same horrible _squitch _as Bryan's crumpling nose. Then the pig-thing would stand over me, hot drool and snot dripping onto my face. It would be joined by others – misshapen shadows descending with hungry grunts and snarls.

Somehow, my pace quickened.

Trees flew past me in a Gaussian blur. Shapes, textures, and distances reduced to impressionistic streaks of dull color. I felt like a gazelle. I began to sacrifice speed for accuracy, dodging into the dead leaves and low-lying creepers to avoid the upturned chunks of pillars, flagstones, and what appeared to be massive cornerstones. Worn statue-forms stared down at me in blank-faced judgment.

My breath went ragged. The ache in my chest continued to pulse like a trench full of hot patch.

I could no longer hear the pursuit of the pig-thing and its companions. No reason to slow down. My thighs and calves burned. They felt about a mile away from my wind-whipped face, with its lips drawn back in a grimace and tongue tasting streamers of cool mist.

And suddenly, there was nothing under the toe of my right shoe. For a fraction of a second, only air resisted the pull of all my weight. Then the tip of the shoe met sloping ground. It sank past leaves and into soft earth. A moment of vertigo sluiced through my head. The left foot landed awkwardly. My knees buckled; I felt the woods about me pitch forward. Inertia carried me onward, and at once I tumbled down an unseen slope.


	16. 16

**16**

Oh shit oh Jesus this is going to –

Oh.

I came to a rest only a few seconds later, landing on my face in a mound of dead leaves. The initial incline was blessedly gentle – it was the velocity that had carried me so easily downhill. I was up quickly, stripping leaves and grass from my hair as I went. That wet, algae-laden pond scent was stronger here.

It was fortunate to have so much rich rotting plant material beneath me. Had it been a gully of stone or even hardpan earth, I probably would have split my head open. A fine meal, already cracked and ready to serve.

As I cocked my head and gained my bearings – whatever they might be – I heard a familiar sound. A slow, graceful murmur slid from my right. Further down the hill – a distant trickle. Water.

I don't know why, but I took this as a good sign.

Panting, I trudged further into what appeared to be a ravine that ran between the hulking trees. Mammoth roots jutted from exposed earth of the ravine wall opposite me. Their gray lengths plunged down to the bottom of the cut, where they tangled together like huge, petrified serpents. After I rounded a splintered stump the size of a Humvee, it became obvious as to why: A wide, smooth creek ran down the nadir of the ravine. The roots gathered at its banks like masses of hysterical worshippers.

I stopped a moment and listened to the forest. The brook below me burbled almost indiscernibly. Out in the trees, I think I heard an echoed _Click-a-click-a-click?_, then an identical insect voice chirping in response. The leaves shook delightedly in a humid burst of wind.

No sounds of pursuit. Not even a squeal or chuff off in the trees behind me. Had I really lost them? Or had they simply learned their lesson, and were now stalking me? No . . . If they (and I had no idea how many "they" comprised) were anything like the first awful creature I had encountered, they were clumsy hunters at best.

That is, if they _were _hunters.

What if this was just another portion of my acid flashback or psychotic break? What if that swine-faced horror, soft and vaguely human, had actually been another person? Perhaps (hilarious only in retrospect) it was a cop. Was I really in a park, running from the LAPD? Could this ravine just be one of the Los Angeles canals, dry but for the fetid trickles that snaked down their centers?

I absently reached up and plucked another dry leaf from behind my ear. I rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger, feeling the waxy surface and brittle innards crunch beneath the weight of my grip.

Jesus.

I continued toward the creek, careful now to watch my footing as I descended. I passed two more broken columns before reaching the floor of the ravine. The stream flowed quietly, its surface glassy smooth but for a few ripples and whorls at its edges. The water itself was almost crystalline. I could see strands of dark green algae in the stream's depths, trailing away from the walls of the creek bed and swaying in the current. Funny, that. I bent down and peered into the water.

The sides of the stream were lined with tiles of the same smooth white stone that made up the statues and general rubble that seemed to litter this place. I could just make out flat, algae-obscured plates of it that ran along the bottom. I blinked. This wasn't a natural stream at all – it was a canal.

I turned my head and looked downstream. The serene surface of the canal continued on down the ravine, disappearing as the cut in the earth jogged left a few hundred feet ahead. The hajj of roots about the canal's flow continued to supplicate as far as I could see. Here and there, an odd pillar stood at the stream's edge. Some stood straight as the day they had been sunk; others leaned and slouched at near-terminal angles. Still more lay horizontal, either tangled in the mass of thirsty roots or buried in the endless piles of fallen leaves.

After looking back and forth, then behind, then back and forth again, I bent to the canal's slow surface and sniffed. It smelled as crisp and cold as it looked. I let my fingers trail across the flow, and then dipped them just past the shining surface. Cold and smooth. Not icy or unpleasant. Just refreshingly chilly. A shiver ran up my back.

I cupped my hands and let a pool of water collect along the lines of my palms. I brought it to my lips. For a moment, I hesitated. What if this _was _nothing but canal water off the bottom of some concrete trench? Lord knew what sort of bacteria and chemical runoff might be flowing through such a stream. Was I crouched amongst discarded cans, broken bottles, and bent hypodermics? Was I looking at a brackish handful of dysentery and HIV? Was I . . . Oh fuck it. I hadn't had anything to drink in what felt like hours. Now that I had stopped running, the hammer-wrapped-in-cotton feeling of a hangover had begun to peal through my head. My tongue and throat felt dry and greasy.

I drank greedily. Delicious – vague traces of minerals and plants. Then I scooped again, slurping. Again. And again. When my belly felt properly waterlogged, I stood and wiped my chin. Good. Better. Much better.

With only a moment's consideration, I began to follow the canal's sluggish flow. Skirting the water's edge, I proceeded down the length of the artificial creek. The walls of the ravine cast inky shadows as I turned the corner I had glimpsed. Ahead of me, the canal wound forward and through banks of ankle-level fog. A barely recognizable stone shape, worn beyond any recognition, perched at the turn and seemed to point the way further down the ravine. The cut ran ever deeper into the forest. Would this canal lead me out? I swallowed. No way to know but to try. I pushed forward.

I followed the canal for some time. Without a watch, it was impossible to gauge how long it was or how far I walked. The going was brisk and easy – at very few times did the ground next to the water ever become anything but level. I had to dodge around more clusters of roots and small groves of eager saplings, but little else blocked my way. More and more signs of civilization – or rather, civilization's passing – jumped out from the foliage. Half crumbled walls sat on the top precipice of the ravine, wrapped with vines. At least two more spherical stone faces leered out from the hillside.

The light grew strange and golden. Leaves caught the descending glow and refracted like jewels. Down in the shadowed belly of the ravine, masses of climbing fungus and broad-capped mushrooms began to glow with phantom blues and greens. The sight should have astounded me, but I found myself curiously disaffected. I didn't know if this was even occurring, really. The more I thought about it, the more I felt my mind detach itself and force indifference.

I eventually stopped to rest beneath the chipped hulk of a stone block easily ten times my size. Woody vines clutched at one of its corners; its sides were pock-marked by water erosion. I slid against its surface and closed my eyes. A few minutes rest. That's all I needed.

My eyes sprang open. I was not alone. I turned my head and rested my right cheek against smooth rock. A shape, vaguely round, clung to the side of the stone. As I watched, it moved up the vertical side of the block with slow, spastic movements.

I rose to one knee and leaned closer to get a better look. Whatever it was, it was about the size of a volleyball, porcelain gray, and covered in odd bumps and swirls. I watched as an oozing, bruised purple tentacle slithered out from beneath the shape and wrapped about a vine. It was climbing. I moved slowly and cautiously, falling back a few feet to keep my distance. I rounded the thing and saw other slick tentacles clutching at the surface of the block. A crescent slit rose up from the base of the gray ovoid, revealing purple-pink flesh beneath. It pulsed slightly with each slow, labored movement. So: The gray surface was a shell. Whatever this thing was, it was a kind of mollusk or octopus, stridently trying to climb up the side of this ruined building block. Fascinating.

I leaned closer.

An eye suddenly opened in the flesh beneath the crescent opening. It was sharp and bright, the iris a mottled blue and its pupil bifurcated like an amoeba mid-split. I stared at it. It stared back. The eye twitched and spun as if it were moving to take in every detail of my form.

The tentacles withdrew back under the shell with a surprising swiftness. There was a weird, unnerving sound – like a straw probing the bottom of a glass, vainly attempting to suck up the last droplets of soda. The shell lifted away from the side of the stone surface and for a brief moment, I saw the shining bulk of the mollusk's body.

Some kind of orifice, perfectly round and gaping black, opened beneath the creature's glaring eyeball.

_THWUP._

"SONOFABITCH!" I screamed as an unseen, solid object impacted with my shoulder. I fell backwards, clutching at the spot, writhing in blank pain. I squeezed my eyes shut and gritted my teeth, shuffling backward as quickly as my squirming legs could propel me.

_THWUP._

I felt a soft puff of wind as something else drove past my face and landed in the leaves beside me. Breathing hard against the bone-chattering pain in my shoulder, I opened one eye and looked beside me. Resting in the leaves was an almost perfectly spherical object, about the size of a handball. I touched it with one finger and came away with slick goo across my skin.

It took me a moment to piece all of this together. As I did, I jumped back to my feet.

That fucker spit a rock at me. It _spit a fucking rock_.

On the stone block, the land mollusk had closed its eye and was continuing its careful ascent. I regarded it with a grimace, wanting badly to grab the nearest loose branch and beat it to death. The fading pain in my shoulder reminded me that it was probably not such a good idea. I rubbed the point of impact with the heel of one hand, thankful that I had at least not broken anything.

I dodged around the opposite side of the block and started back down the length of the canal. I wondered if, in real life, I had just been attacked by a pitching machine.

I suppose that at that point my cognitive dissonance was running at high gear. How I didn't start to wonder . . . to actually apply what I had seen . . . Well, I can only say now that it's fairly astounding. All the same, I didn't have much time to think and consider my situation. What came next came fast and hard.

Not a minute after leaving the rock-spitting mollusk behind me, _they_ came from the trees on the hillside. They ran in a howling, squealing wave. I imagine that they heard my cry of pain – that they were anywhere near me must have been a coincidence. They weren't built for stealth. They dashed at me in that same dirty iron armor, with yellow eyes and spittle trailing out their gaping mouths. I had only a moment to note their number – six, including the first pig-man with the chewed ear. He trailed at the rear of the pack, his axe held almost comically over his head.

Too fast to think. I ran.


	17. 17

**17**

I was trapped.

Oh no – no no no. Oh God. Trapped. The six pig-things, their rough armor clattering against their flabby skin, were just yards behind me. If I made a break for the hillside to my right, they would almost certainly catch me as I struggled up the detritus-strewn slope. To my left was the canal – too wide to jump, but certainly slow enough to swim. But what then? The opposite side of the ravine terminated in a sheer earthen cliff, covered in the roiling mass of roots from the trees above. Would I be able to climb them? In any event, where would that place me? The things behind me must have known these woods. No matter where I went, they would find me. They would pursue me across the canal, stripping off their heavy iron plates as they forded the stream.

No. No. I had no choice. No options. All I could do was run down the course of the stream, and hope that their stubby, waddling legs wouldn't allow them to catch up to me.

Their grunts and wheezing breath reached my ears in staccato bursts.

No choice at all.

A moment of surprise: There was no panic. Even as the ravine's walls roared past me and my feet kicked up bursts of dirt and foliage, I was strangely calm. If panic did indeed grip me, it was like an old and welcome friend. My thoughts, quick and jittery as jackrabbits, remained at my side.

Thank God for these long legs of mine. Thank God for their hideous, flabby excuses for legs. I gained ground fast, running at a near-gallop between cornerstones and columns. I adjusted my pace, hoping to stave off exhaustion. My calves already twitched and tingled with the landing of each long stride. The hunters' cries remained ever at my back.

Can't lose them. Can't fight; I could maybe get lucky against one, but not six – six! – of them. Think, dammit. Watch that tree. Think, vault that log; good good; that will hold them a moment. Stubby little legs.

The canal cut around a blind corner. The floor of the ravine dropped slightly; I adapted. My face, chest, and shoulder were on fire. All about the sides of the ravine, the huge trees grew closer and closer together. I sped past riots of vines and whole nations of shimmering mushrooms.

I chanced a look backwards. A gaggle of near-silhouettes struggled after me. They held tight to the canal, appearing to hurry. Not that they needed to – if they kept a steady pace and backed me into a dead end, or just exhausted me, it would be over.

I turned back.

My thoughts pounded with an earthquake's rhythm. I will beat you. I will beat you. I will beat you, you bastards, you no-name fuckholes. I have no idea where I am or what you are, but I swear . . . I _swear_ . . .

Wait. How far behind me are they?

I slipped between a lichen-covered section of wall and an undulating hummock of roots.

At least ten yards – maybe fifteen. I outpaced them, and . . . Could I break away? Something in my chest fluttered weakly. Could I chance it? A dash to the right and I would be up the slope, a mere climb out of the ravine and back to the maze of trees.

I could feel the elevation dropping again.

Yes. Yes! That was it. I had to take a chance. I had to . . . had to . . . Oh no.

Despite the drop in the ground beneath me, the walls of the ravine were also growing noticeably shorter. The masses of tree trunks, their roots spread out like winding thrones, were falling to meet the bottom of the cut. I looked ahead and saw that no more than a hundred feet out, the ground evened and the ravine came to a stop. Just beyond that, the shimmering black glass of the canal disappeared into a stand of massive, swirl-barked trees.

End of the line.

One amongst my pursuers must have made the same observation: A growling cry of victory followed in my wake.

_There _was Friend Panic. Hello, friend. Hello.

My lips curled back across my teeth. I bent forward and began to sprint. I covered ground at a mad, dead run. Air chuffed in and out of my open mouth like a firestorm.

The end of the ravine and the wall of trees beyond it loomed. I could tell that the pack was picking up speed, frantic to match my pace now, gibbering as they did.

No plans. Just move.

There was a gap in the rows of tree trunks, right where the canal drove between them. I aimed my careening body and my feet found their mark. A strip of wet earth, no more than five feet wide, ran between the canal edge and the solid gray wall of the nearest tree. Eyes blurring; sweat flowing freely at the temples and along the nape of the neck; heart pulsing like it wanted to explode; misty copper in the back of my throat. I closed my eyes and barreled through the passage.

In the dark, nothing but motion.

My feet struck stone.

A fine warm wind rose up around me. It subsided with the quiet grace of a lover's breath.

I felt, rather than heard, a somber, expectant silence.

I opened my eyes. My pistoning legs slowed to a run, then an awkward jog, then to a quick trot . . . and then stopped. I stood still then, feeling the vulgar pains of my body begin to fade. Although each inhalation pressed against the injured fault line in my chest, the pain ceased to register as anything but distant static.

The light that fell in the clearing was deep, rich, and fiery. It painted the smooth flagstones beneath me in great amber pools and gentle shadows. The leaves through which it passed shone like phosphorescent jewels.

It was an immense, open space; perfectly round and enclosed by trees on all sides. A vault of intertwined branches rose high above me, the intricate trellis letting in only those brilliant shafts of orange fireglow. Webs of roots and creepers spindled away from the trees and into the clearing. The canal beside me continued on toward the center of the open space.

The silence parted like a gossamer curtain. A slow, gentle susurrus – water lapping and flowing about stone walls – rose like a whisper.

There were other canals, six of them, that spilled from the wooded walls of the clearing. They ran like the spokes of a wagon wheel, converging at the middle of the stone-paved space. The seven wide lines of water glowed like iridescent magma as they passed under the dusklight pouring through the trees. Each canal dropped at its endpoint, burbling into a circular pond. The water sitting at the center of the shining paths was rippling and green. At the water's own center was an island, cast in shadows. Seven tall statues stood at the edges of the island, faces cast out on each of the canals that fed into the surrounding waters. Their forms were rain-bitten and obscured by lichen, moss, and hungry vines. A structure like a squat Mayan ziggurat rose from the base of the statues, past the surface of the water, and climbed a dozen feet above the floor of the clearing. Its sides were sculpted from gray stone and were patched with beds of moss. At its flat apex, something shone like a distant star at twilight.

I must have stood there for upwards a minute, watching the sun-dappled waters swirl on to their conclusions. My lungs shuddered and my ankles ached.

Guttural sounds: Grunting, mewling, panting. I turned and beheld the six pig-things loitering at the edge of the clearing. The largest of their number, a thuggish gray mound with eyes like bad oysters, paced back and forth at the threshold between forest floor and flagstones. Behind it, the remaining five shivered and exhaled through their grotesque nostrils. The big hunter stepped close to the edge, surveyed the vast space beyond the trees, and squealed with obvious frustration. It leaned forward, sniffing as it went. Then, as if it had received a shock to the tip of its snout, it leaped back on its jiggling legs.

Apparently, they would come no further. I was safe here in the strange clearing. I let loose an involuntary, delighted sigh of relief. That there might be something even worse out in the twilit space never occurred to me. All that mattered was that the pursuit had ended. I'm safe. I'm safe. I repeated it to myself like a mantra.

I think that comprehension finally began to come to me, then. A glimmer, like the one at the top of the island, shone in a distant corner of my mind. Awash in phantom light, my fears and pains subsiding like surreal memories, I finally began to realize and understand. No words came; there were instead sensations, resonating quietly through my flesh and at the borders of my thoughts. A sweet melancholy and an undeniable moment of déjà vu.

I approached the structure at the center of the clearing and the mossy pond from which it rose. The stones beneath my feet were by turns immaculate and crumbling. Roots shoved themselves up between the cracked slabs. Tiny mushrooms peppered the wet, pockmarked banks of each canal. The only sounds were the diminishing throaty voices of the pig-things and the insistent lap of water in stone basins.

The size of the clearing became more and more apparent as I trekked further. It was at least a hundred yards from the tree-line to the edge of the pond. Each contemplative statue must have stood fifty feet tall, from the tips of their algae-laden toes to the top of their bowed heads. The vault of arching branches hung another fifty to sixty feet beyond that. I felt as if I was entering some silent, abandoned cathedral.

Directly ahead, a level bridge carved from the same stone as the ziggurat and its surrounding statues jutted out over the still green water. It connected the island with the stone-paved land that surrounded it. Beyond that, a gentle staircase climbed the side of the pyramid. Its steps were sunk into the solid rock. My pace had strengthened. I stepped across the bridge, crossing the distance quickly. Below, indefinable shapes darted back and forth deep in the water.

On the first stair, the light shifted. A rain of amber fell across the steps, pooling in corners and illuminating subtle bands in the stone. Shaggy moss glittered with inner moisture. Pioneering tufts of grass swayed at my passing. I paused a moment and realized that my heart was beating a manic rhythm. It was there – right on the glacial tip of my brain.

I ascended. There wasn't far to go; only two dozen or so steps separated the level ground and the top of the ziggurat. I licked my lips and looked back across the long yards separating my back and the pig-things. They continued to twitch and shudder at the clearing's edge. Their cries were silent pantomime. Firelight flooded the world now, half-blinding, a sea of rippling gold and umber.

I took the final steps at a run. The last of them dropped behind me. I stood at the pinnacle of the ziggurat. All around me, the seven figures rose and bent forward at the shoulders. I could see now that they had all been clothed in eroding robes. Their heads bowed forward and their hands clasped together in prayer. At one time, each of them had had a unique face. Now, obscured by cloaks of mold and algae, chewed at by time, they stood in silent equality.

Déjà vu like a physical thing. Like strong hands caressing up and down my spine.

The flat space at the top of the ziggurat was small and mostly covered by rolling hills of emerald moss. At its center was a pedestal or altar, rising to the level of my thighs. The light of dusk slipped down and shone across the object that stood there:

A sword.

I swallowed. My dry throat closed against the movement.

All sound died. That familiar, expectant silence followed me as I slowly walked the remaining distance to the altar.

I know this. Déjà vu. On the tip of the tongue now, just waiting to be spoken. Refusing to. A tingle, very much like the expectant buzz that had accompanied the moments before I had lost my virginity, began to run through my arms and legs.

The sword plunged blade-down into the stone of the altar. Only the hilt, curved inward toward the blade and covered with a series of geometric designs, could be seen clearly. The cross-guard and handle were a faded blue. A single young creeper wrapped curiously about the sword's handle. A symbol, etched in luminous gold, sat at the center of the sword's hilt.

My legs gave way. I fell, body like a rag doll, to my knees. They landed in the forgiving pillow of moss below the altar.

Oh, thank God. Thank God thank God thank God.

I croaked what might have been a word of thanks, but was more likely just a rogue, incomprehensible syllable. It took some effort to keep from weeping.

That symbol . . .

It was the Triforce.

It was the Triforce and thank God, because I was dreaming. It was the Triforce and there was no forest; there was no sword; there was no climbing octorock; there were no ruins; there was no pig-thing waving a crude axe. It was the Triforce and I was hallucinating. It was the Triforce and I had gone insane.

Compared to the alternative, all of this was a blessing.

I coughed and stared and felt tears in my eyes. I sniffled.

From my knees, I reached out and touched the hilt of the sword. Its dull blue metal was cool and very real beneath my fingers. I laughed.

I wiped absently at my eyes. It wasn't joy or relief I felt; not wonder or amazement; not disappointment or shame. What I felt was unnamable – the kind of hybrid emotion that buzzes in your soul when at last you realize that a dream in progress is just a dream. The hope, happiness, fear, or hysteria evaporates into a curious, bittersweet sensation. I felt it then, touching the sword with two fingers. It couldn't be real, and praise be to Allah for that. But now, all I had to look forward to was the sterile truth of waking. Nothing would ever be as strange and hyper-real as this again.

I stood and stepped back from the altar with a sad smile. Just a dream. A beautiful, terrible dream.

The world of sound returned to me. Water whispered. Warm breeze capered between branches. The pig-things squealed and cried like spurned children. And none of it real.

The sword, the _Master Sword_, because it could be no other, sat before me as if in judgment. It gleamed. Also unreal.

All I could do was wait. Either I woke from this godforsaken place, this dream of video games past . . . Or I didn't. So real. But not. Jesus.

Out in a world beyond my own, the mewls of the pig-things grew more insistent. They rose in pitch and rhythm. A snorting, grunting bellow rose amongst them. Something changed.

I turned to look back on them, half-hoping for that uncanny moment when the dream melts past logic or any semblance of sense. Perhaps I would be greeted with ice-cream men handing out communist fliers; perhaps I would stand toe-to-toe with a nameless, serene woman with glistening skin and heaving breasts. Perhaps I would return once more to my dreams of concert halls and cathedrals.

The world remained frustratingly constant. There were the six pig-things, waving their weapons above their mashed-potato heads and roaring wordlessly. They stood at the edge of the clearing like . . . Wait.

Not six. Five. Only five.

My eyes traced down. A sense of sick anticipation grew as my gaze followed the moss-strewn cobbles.

It was the big one – the pig-thing at the head of the pack. The one with wide, poisonous eyes. It had broken away from the group and ventured into the clearing. As if goaded on by terror or hunger or some hideous madness, it drove across the stones in a loping run. It was coming for me.


	18. 18

**18**

It's difficult to maintain a blasé attitude in the face of a nightmare. Even if one realizes that the confronting image is just an illusion, the primal instincts it evokes can sometimes override the rational mind. Terror is an old, fleshy function. It rises from the four-legged mammal centers and tight little knots of lizard tissue deep in our brains.

I mention this because it goes a long way toward explaining my reaction at that moment. It was entirely clear that I stood amidst a dream or at the very least a potent acid flashback. No other possible rational explanation could explain this place or the hellish creature barreling across the temple clearing. Truth be told, if any other symbol than the Triforce had been etched on that sword, I might still have believed in the reality of this vision. However, the evidence was clear: There could be no sword because it was part of a video game – a creation of man's imagination. A series of electronic pixels projected by a cathode ray tube. A toy. These images – the illusion in which I was saturated – were burned into my memory and written on my skin. But they weren't real. Never real. Never flesh nor bone nor steel.

All the same, those rat and slithering amphibian brain parts pulled taut. My forearms flexed hard as brass coils. My gut roiled and clenched. All I knew in that moment was the sensation of terror and the accompanying adrenaline; the image, the _simulacra_, of a creature from fantasy made utterly real. It was flesh and I was flesh. It moved . . . And so I moved too.

My fingers slid down and wrapped about the hilt of the sword.

The lead pig-thing charged forward, gray tongue lolling out over its scar-laden cheeks. Huge, angular spikes of rusting iron jutted from its armored shoulders. They seemed catch the light and cut it, like knives ripping through silk. In its mutant hands it held a double-bladed battle axe, pitted with time and neglect. It looked dull but deadly.

I felt like I might hyperventilate. The tender green vine that wrapped about the hilt of the sword crushed beneath my fingers. Slick, watery sap flowed across the contours of my fingers.

It was almost to the stone bridge now.

There are moments in my life that, when remembered, make little sense to me. I genuinely do not know what went through my head as I stared down at the oncoming creature. Like the fuzzy "SCENE MISSING" gap of a blackout drunk, that instant of reaction remains a mystery to me. I can guess only at a pure, fight-or-flight instinct that hijacked my mind.

All I really know is that my hand grasped the hilt of the sword tightly, then pulled.

The pig-thing careened onto the bridge.

The sword didn't budge even a millimeter. Oh shit oh shit damn fuck hell. I pulled harder, blind panic, never blinking or looking away from the thing with the battle axe. Harder. Every muscle up and down my arms convulsed.

Closer. I could hear its grunting, panting, slobbering breath. At the edge of the clearing, its compatriots jumped and hooted and howled.

_Click._

A tiny, mechanical sound – like a cogwheel falling forward a tooth or a lock disengaging.

I felt movement; my body reeled. The thin silvery sound of steel sliding against stone. I felt momentum; my chest ached and my biceps pulsed. The sword rose from the altar, the blade revealed. I felt its weight as it slipped from its prison; my head pounded with molten thunder. I felt ecstasy and joy and the sweet numbing empowering enlightening touch of adrenaline.

Held aloft, burning twilight ran along the immaculate blade and shone like a supernova. For a moment, the entire world was drowned out by a burst of bright reflected light. An ocean of fire enveloped my senses. I inhaled hot wet air that tasted of summers past.

I felt weightless.

And then it passed. The descending column of light subsided, twisting away from the sword like a departing rainstorm. An uncanny weight spread into my arms. The hands holding the sword fell in an accelerating arc. Relentless gravity. Jesus! Much heavier than it had first seemed. I managed to steady it before the tip struck stone, but only just.

When I looked down, I half-expected to be clothed in a green tunic and leather boots. It was a great relief to see loose polyester, denim, and sneakers. Reminders that at least the basics remained constant.

The breeze shifted. A sour hint of something – like the ghost of spoiled meat at the bottom of a trash can – reached my nostrils.

I gripped the sword tighter. I raised my face and flipped back a rogue strand of hair dangling before my eyes.

Amber twilight fell in waves across the temple clearing. Through the patchwork of light and shadow, the wide wild pig-thing galloped up to the base of the stairs. It stared up at me and bellowed something – a word or a meaningless shout of rage, I'll never know. And then it started up.

Less than thirty feet away now. Nothing but the breeze and the sound of its clomping steps upon the stone. Heavy breathing – its, my own. I took a step toward the lip of the staircase and looked over the precipice. The stairs seemed to fall like a cliff-edge. The pig-thing's ascent was superhuman, amazing, gut-wrenching. It came like a bull elephant, a cape buffalo, some splay-toothed beast from the age of saber-tooth tigers. I could see the shine of spittle on its stubble-strewn cheeks; I could smell the hideous mélange of its body odor; I heard each grunting, stomping step it took toward me.

Dreams. Nightmares. Logic fled me then – that last, hardiest holdout of the rational mind. Rules and regulations fell away. Laws of physics disappeared. Cause and effect meant nothing. Only the amorphous puzzle-logic of dreams remained.

The last conscious thought I remember flashing through my mind was single nonsense word: _Moblin._ Only later did this make sense.

After that, nothing but light and speed and motion. The pure symphony of the isolated senses played through my body, singing along the nerves like an electric current.

I leapt from the top of the stairs and swung the sword back in a single motion.

In dreams, we can fly. I flew then – flew as if I were Icarus. I left the solid world of gravity and once again felt the glorious tingling liberation of freefall. And I descended, slashing the sword in a huge and awkward horizontal arc as I went. A baseball swing.

There are certain images I'm absolutely sure I'll be able to remember with perfect clarity even on my deathbed. One of them will be the look of confused shock on the moblin's face as I sailed past it, swinging the Master Sword in a grand decapitating stroke -- three feet above the top of its head.

I landed messily, my feet tangling on a narrow stair step, the sword's weight dragging me forward. I felt gravity's insistent hand tip me down toward moss-patched stone. The moblin at my back issued a thin, keening howl.

I'm not sure how I managed it, but I pivoted with my entire upper torso, jabbing the sword out like a divining rod. The stark movement swung me back around in a tilting whirl. The blade's weight pulled me with it, and I found myself stabbing forth with my entire body. I must have looked like the most awkward, gangly participant of hammer toss event. In the midst of this bumbling whirlwind, I caught sight of the moblin's own turn to face me. It squealed in frustration; thick slobber ejected in streamers from its bared teeth.

My own movement followed through; momentum pulled me to the left in a stuttering spin. My feet scrambled beneath me to compensate, and at once I felt my back heel slip over the edge of the stair, teetering out over nothing. My back arched and I jabbed down with the errant foot for purchase. Finding the stone, but no way to correct my body's inertia, my feet continued to slap backward. Suddenly, I found myself scrabbling down the stairs like a frightened crustacean.

The moblin followed. The distance between us could be measured in arm lengths. It hopped down two steps and hefted its massive axe above its head, bringing it down in a wobbling crescent meant to impact with my skull. My own gyrating course down the ziggurat slipped the target from its path and the axe crashed against the stairs with a heavy _CLANG!_ – a sound like someone smashing two cast-iron pans together in rage.

No time to think of strategy. No time to calculate dodges or maneuvers. My sword sat pointed outward in a stiff thrust, more a talisman than a weapon, clutched in my hands as if to ward off the creature before me rather than harm it. The sword was as alien to me as anything else in this nightmare world – solid, unwieldy, and surprisingly heavy. Hadn't it always been held one-handed? Fucking hell. I could barely hold it with two hands, much less swing it around like an acrobat.

I wheeled around and stumbled down the bottom steps, out across the bridge and onto the cracked flagstones of the clearing. Open space now. Nowhere to run, but all the room I needed to fight. But how to fight? I readjusted the grip on the sword and held it up at a tilted angle, attempting some farcical approximation of a fencing position. It came closer to the coiled grip of a batter taking the plate, but anything was better than the scarecrow position I had taken on the stairs.

I realized that my mouth was open. Hard coppery breaths drove in and out of my throat.

Its vile eyes gleaming, the moblin thumped and bumped to the bottom of the stairs, heaving up its axe to its shoulder as it came. It crossed the bridge at a determined lope.

I dashed to it. The sword swung with every muscle in my shoulders behind it. Mewling, the moblin dropped its axe toward me. Foul, grayish sweat rolled off its arms in beads and rivulets.

My sword went wide.

Its axe passed beside my shoulder.

I rolled left and somehow regained control of my weapon's velocity; my wrists growled in protest as I twisted the hilt and whipped the blade back at the moblin.

The axe curved back up.

A hideous, eardrum-jarring clash. Crude black iron and gleaming steel collided, axe blade to sword blade. The dull edge of the axe sprang back. The force nearly sent me to my back; instead, I hurled all my weight forward and nearly plummeted straight into the moblin's bulging abdomen.

The monster screamed at me then – screamed like a hyena in heat. Its tiny pupils shown with dusk fire. Oozing perspiration seemed to glow across its skin.

I raised the Master Sword above my head and brought it down as if was chopping wood. The moblin dove toward me, and the blade careened off of one of its huge, gaudy shoulder pads. My arms ached as I brought the sword around again, and –

– I was screaming too –

– it mewled as it brought up its axe to block, and the blow drove it to its knees. I kicked out and struck nothing, losing my balance, and dizzily slashed down as the axe hacked upward -

– and I was screaming –

– and I spun around to avoid the blow, spun _completely _around, as if pirouetting, blindly striking out as I went. The circle ended, and –

– _THUNK_ –

– there was a very solid sound. A very _final _sound. The sound of a cleaver landing in a thick cut of steak. A dull tremor traveled up the blade of the sword and crawled through the bones of my arms.

For a moment, things were very quiet.

The blade of the sword sat halfway in and halfway out of the left side of the moblin's thick neck. A runnel of red had begun to run down the length of the blade, tracing out from the spot where steel first cleaved skin. The moblin's eyes were very wide and very surprised. They darted from me to the sword sunk into its flesh, almost as if in disbelief. It stood frozen. The axe hung limply from its halfhearted claws.

I stood frozen, too. And then I took a single step back, and the sword slipped from the moblin's neck with an unforgettable noise – a slick, wet sound of tissue gripping, then parting. The sword's passage left a deep, ragged fissure across the creature's neckline.

The moblin stumbled backward. I blinked. A single moment later, thick bright blood sprayed out of the wound as if it jetted from a broken hose. Confusion turned to panic; the moblin dropped its axe and flailed its lumpy hands to its neck. Blood spurted from between its fingers in a constant stream. Its armor stained crimson on black. Red washed across its hoary skin and puddled beneath its feet. The blood poured out over the stone cobbles and settled in the cracks.

It was only when it began to make noises – horrible, desperate noises – that rational thought began its return to my head.

"_Skreeee! Skreeee!_" Behind it, at the tree line, I saw the other moblins roaring and jumping about, gnashing their teeth. The moblin before me howled and mewled and cried. Tears splashed from its wide eyes and snot poured from its nostrils. "_Skreeeeeeeeee!_" it screamed, and all I could do was watch.

It was dying. I had killed it.

Its blood flowed more weakly now, more a creek than a broken dam. It sank to its knees in a lake of its own blood. "_Skreeee_." Softer now.

This thing, whatever it was, knew it was dying. Its eyes were pleading me now, asking me to do something, anything. It didn't want to die. It feared dying. As ugly and misshapen and horrible as it was, it didn't want to die.

I sucked a single, agonizing breath of air. I tasted hot blood as clearly as if it were on my tongue. I stepped back from this thing at my feet.

"_Skree!" _Eyes glassy now. The blood came at a mere trickle. Its body leaned, about to capsize.

I had killed. The weight of it, even in this abstract form, seemed to press upon my shoulders. I shifted the sword into one hand, feeling its terrible burdensome weight reverberate through my skin and into the marrow of my bones.

The dying thing let out a single, final croak and fell over.

Nightmares.

I turned and ran. Once more, rational thoughts sank beneath waves of something indescribable. Part fear, part exhilaration, part horror. That last emotion coursed through my muscles and made me feel nauseous. A singular realization, beyond dreams and beyond the acknowledgment of illusion, had taken hold of my mind. An epiphany that danced beside me like a skeletal jester, howling mad mocking laughter. Revelations of flesh and blood and bone.

I jumped like an antelope across the first canal to block my way, then sprinted toward the edge of the temple clearing. Sword in hand, I plunged past the sentinel trees and back into the endless woods. The path beneath my feet turned to spongy rotten earth. Warm wet wind whipped past my face. The leaves grew thick as storm clouds. I closed my eyes.

The light ended, and in its place came a sweet nothingness.


	19. 19

**19**

I woke.

Flat sunlight fell across my face. A dull, stewing heat swam about me. My clothes clung to my skin with a thin, greasy film of flop-sweat. I sat up.

A blank television screen stared back at me. A distorted, bulbous ghost-reflection of my face, body, and bed stood out on it.

I smacked my dry lips and reached up to rub one sleep-swollen eye. Instantly, I drew back – as I touched the area around my left eye, it felt as if my entire face had been doused with acid.

A blinking switchboard of sensations lit up across my body. The waxy feeling of dry sweat caked over the skin; the distant grumble of a receding hangover; a vague, bilious taste in the back of my throat; aches in each joint behind the elbows and knees; a sharp, white-hot pain drumming along my ribs; the tender, stinging sensation of bruised flesh.

What a fucking night.

Everything in my bedroom appeared to be as it should be. The TV must have shut off on its own. I had fallen asleep playing video games often; as such, I programmed my bedroom television to power down after an hour without a command from the remote control. Below the TV, the Nintendo's power light still glowed a soft red.

I yawned, and my parched esophagus shuddered in disapproval.

Pulling myself up on my haunches, I thought back over the previous night. What a goddamn nightmare – both literally and figuratively. First I just about hit rock bottom at Jeff's party. Then, I had been assaulted by the worst and most vivid dream I had ever experienced in the entirety of my life.

Jesus, what a thing that had been. Centipedes and moblins and octorocks, oh my. _The Legend of Zelda Goes to Hell_. Fuck me.

It made a certain sense when I thought about it. Dark thoughts by day caused dark dreams by night. My increasingly strong existential brooding had come to a certain stormlike head the day before. Then had come the disjointed party, which had been like a litany of emotional stab wounds – drunken disappointment, Marilyn's patronizing rejection, blank confusion at that nameless woman's bizarre remarks, the sudden brawl with Bryan, and finally getting the boot from Jeff himself. Fuck, it was no wonder that my dreams were so labyrinthine and startling.

I could even draw parallels between the dream symbols and what had happened the night before. Yeah. Exactly. The moblin leader had been Bryan in subconscious disguise. Its minions were every two-bit bully and tough guy who had ever slapped pavement after me, whether it was on the playground or at a bar. The forest stood for my own muddled life – a shrouded ruin of empty gullies and rotting histories. The sword was . . . Well, I guess that . . . Shit. I _had _drifted off while playing a goddamn video game. Those internalized images must have seeped into the proceedings as surely as spilled toxins spread into groundwater.

The closed room sweltered like a cubical Dutch oven. I swung my legs off of the bed (I had never crawled under the covers, and thank God for that – I would have roasted like a pheasant) and felt oddly calmed by the sensation of bare toes touching carpet fibers. There was a curious weight in the movement – as if it marked the final transition between sleep and waking.

I stood and stretched. Taut pain rolled across my chest and burst on my shoulder. Goddamn.

Sweating, I opened my door and padded across the hall into the bathroom. I relieved myself of a surprisingly small amount of last night's drinking, and then moved over to the sink. The water that poured from the faucet was unnervingly warm – even the pipes were languishing. I splashed a handful of tepid water on my face and grabbed a nearby hand towel to dry off. As I did, I hissed audibly. More stinging reminders of the previous night.

I brought the towel away from my face and examined myself in the mirror. A stubborn swatch of now-wet dirt sat on my chin. A dead strip of grass protruded from my unkempt and unrestrained hair. My left eye was surrounded by a puffy ring of wretched purple flesh. Below it was a small, surface-level scrape that was just beginning to scab over. The fruits of Bryan's precisely-placed fist. In full, a fucking mess.

I wiped the remaining grime from my face. With my free hand, I scratched absently at my chest. Dull, constant pain radiated away from my pressing fingertips and raced up through my ribs.

I exited the bathroom and shuffled, Frankenstein-like, down the hall and into the living room. The droning sounds of the box fans fell forth to greet me. Marijuana funk swam through the soupy air. Two figures sat on the couch, nearly motionless. Their heads turned to watch my approach.

"The conquering hero awakes!" Stuart called out cheerily. He turned from the couch and surveyed me with a smirk. "That's quite a shiner you got there, dude."

"Hurts like a motherfucker," I yawned.

Allen sat on the far end of the couch, a sly little smile plastered across his lips. "You want some breakfast? I picked up some donuts on the way home." He seemed highly amused by this. "Actually, it's gonna be lunch for you, huh?"

I trudged over to the kitchenette, where a mostly-empty box of pastries sat open and forlorn. I snatched out a chocolate-glazed donut and took a hearty bite from it. A sugary godsend. "What time is it?" I asked, mouth full.

"Just after 12:30," Stuart laughed.

"Jesus." I chewed off another quarter of the donut.

"Yeah man," Stuart said. "We were getting worried. Thought we might have to come in and check to see if Bryan hadn't given you brain damage. It would have sucked to find your dumb ass dead." He rumbled quiet, basso laughter.

The last of the donut disappeared through my teeth and down my throat. "Har-dee-har," I chuffed. "I feel like I got put through a rock crusher." I retrieved a glass from the cupboards, filled it with a blast from the kitchen faucet, and downed a gulp of warmish water.

Stuart rubbed a hand through his hair and said, "You do look a lot worse off than last night."

"Eh. Didn't have time for this bit of loveliness to really set in." I pointed to the black eye. "I barely knew how bad he fucked me up myself. Must have been the beer."

Stuart grinned. "You sure as shit gave it back to him, though."

That I had. I hadn't even known I had that in me, really. Funny what happens when you combine alcohol and adrenaline, I guess.

"You heard anything from your brother?" I asked. Another gulp of water, a melting sugary taste still swimming about the back of my tongue.

"Naw man. Either he's sleeping it off or he's sulking."

I killed the rest of the water, and then deposited the glass in the dishwasher at my knees. As I shut the appliance's door, I said, "He seemed pretty pissed."

"He was," Stuart sighed.

My eyes flitted to Stuart. He faced forward, eyes locked on the television. Onscreen, a CNN talking head spoke into the camera in a grave pantomime. Green letters stood out over the top left corner of the screen: "MUTE." Along the bottom, the news ticker spelled out the litany of the day's disasters in bold panic yellow. FRENCH AIRLINER CRASHES OUTSIDE MARSEILLES; OVER 200 FEARED DEAD.

"You don't seem so broken up about it," I said tentatively. I rounded the corner of the kitchenette and stepped back into the living room.

"Bryan's a douchebag," Stuart said. "I've only hung out with him a couple times, and he's pretty cool when he's sober. Too bad he's drunk so often. And he's a mean drunk."

"No kidding," I said flatly.

"I mean – what you did _was _pretty stupid." Stuart still looked away from me. Allen, on the other hand, looked at me with that same cat-caught-the-mouse grin. "But somebody had to do it eventually," Stuart finished.

I sighed, slid my palm through my greasy hair, and then sat down on the couch. The ticker declared: ALASKA SENATOR TO BE INDICTED ON MONEY LAUNDERING CHARGES.

"So are _we _cool?" I asked.

Stuart's ganja-bloodshot eyes finally turned to me. He grinned and pressed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose with his index finger. "Shit man, you know me. 'Course we're cool. I said it was stupid, but man was it badass." He released a growling, lupine chuckle. "Too bad this tool," he hooked thumb over his shoulder at Allen, "wasn't there to see it."

"Yeah man, where were you?" I asked. My mood – groggy and strangely nervous – brightened. Latent curiosity flared through me.

Allen chuckled, "Well, uh . . ." He looked down and back to the TV, as if embarrassed.

"Go on," Stuart grinned.

"Well. Heh. Lacey called me a little before ten-thirty. So, apparently before you decided to play vigilante."

"That's cool. What'd she say?" I asked.

"She was all kinds of apologetic. Said that she had had some kind of a panic attack or flashback – something about bad shrooms she had back in the day – and completely forgot our dinner plans. So I told her where I was, and she agreed to come meet me."

I raised my eyebrows provocatively. "The plot thickens." Despite the gesture, a ghostly sense of disquiet rolled just beneath my stomach. What was it that he had said? A flashback? I scratched the back of my waxy neck. Nothing. Ignore it. Jumping at shadows.

Allen nodded appreciatively, then continued, "She showed up about twenty minutes later, looking like hell. We kind of hung out a bit and mingled, but then we . . ." His smile faltered a bit. He suddenly seemed nervous.

"Keep going," I prodded.

Onscreen: SAN FRANCISCO QUAKE CUTS POWER TO THOUSANDS.

As Allen began to speak, I waved a reflexive palm and jabbered, "Wait. Waitwaitwait. When'd that shit happen?" I pointed to the tail end of the yellow letters as they slid left and into oblivion. Behind them came: QUAKE MEASURED AT 5.4 ON RICHTER SCALE.

Stuart barked out another harsh laugh. "Sometime last night. I mean, morning. Like 3 or 4 AM, I think."

Allen nodded somberly. "Good thing I didn't end up going to Oakland, huh?"

"Damn," I muttered. I shook my head and slid my attention back to Allen. "Anyway."

Allen seemed to examine something under the fingernail of his left thumb. He rubbed thumb and forefinger together apprehensively. As I was about to goad him further, he spouted, "Long story short, I told her how I felt. She admitted that she felt the same way. So, we ended up fucking. I slept at her place last night."

For a moment, I let the slithering hot air and the whir of the window fans be my answer. Then, I nodded appreciatively. "Nice. Glad that worked out."

Stuart smacked my arm playfully with the back of his hand. "Dude, it's awesome! Show some enthusiasm! When's the last time it came out that well for _you_?"

I winced, more in theatrics than in real pain. "Hey, what do you want? A parade? I got my ass beat last night." Smiling weakly, I said to Allen, "Seriously though, congrats. Are you two, uh, official? Or whatever the fuck?"

I eyed the bong on the coffee table. Beyond it: NO LUCK IN SEARCH FOR MISSING HIKERS.

"Sorta, I guess . . ." Allen said. He drew his knees up to his chest and continued, "She's coming by later today to pick me up. We're gonna head up to Santa Barbara for a bit to offload this E I told you about. So I guess it will depend on how that goes, huh?"

A hit of weed seemed like exactly the thing I needed at that moment. Heat or no heat; injury or health; nightmares or no nightmares – a little marijuana always seemed to smooth things out and make them more manageable. The more Allen spoke, the stronger that feeling of indefinable nervous tension grew. It seemed to pool between my shoulder blades and at the base of my spine, seeping into the muscles and slowly constricting them.

I pointed to the bong and asked no one in particular, "Is this thing ready?"

"Might be a little cashed," Stuart said. "Welcome to give it a try."

Allen sighed audibly.

I gave the bong a quick inspection, found that said cashing was not in fact imminent, and produced a plastic lighter from my jeans pocket. In short order, I performed that tried-and-true bong ritual. Fire and water. The burble of smoke rising through the inner chamber was familiar music indeed. I inhaled. Harsh, then smooth. It sailed into my lungs and swam about hungrily. I exhaled. No coughing for me. No sir. A veteran was I.

As if in anticipation, I rose to procure another glass of water. The effect hit me halfway through my return trip to the couch. An expectant buzz, rising in the extremities and climbing through the flesh in a pleasant tremor. My senses numbed and quieted. My movements seemed to grow long and slow and sinuous. The hot, relentless world seemed to recede pleasantly into the distance. That dreadful anxious energy that had been building since I had awoken seemed to vanish, subsumed completely.

I smiled dumbly and dropped onto the couch. The feeling of smooth fabric on my tingling arms was divine.

"_That_," I said, "is good shit."

And it was. Jesus. I was usually so inured to the stuff that it took two or three hits before a buzz decided to join my company. Christ this was powerful.

"I think it's called 'Tequila Sunrise,'" Allen said. His side of the couch seemed to be about eighteen feet away. Fantastic! "I get it from some old hippy who does hydroponics work out in Humboldt County. Grows it in plastic kiddy pools, if you can believe that."

Stuart gestured to me. "Dude, you need another hit?"

"Fuck no!" I laughed.

"Good Christ, man. Just one go? For you?"

"Yeah," I marveled. "This will tide me over for . . . a while."

And it did. Another hour and a half, in fact. A marathon, given my tolerance for the stuff.

Though Allen never partook of his bounty, the three of us sat like grinning Buddhas, watching the muted news channel and talking idly of random things. I'm not sure how Allen could stand all the stoned inanities without a puff of his product. All I can imagine is that he was anxiously killing time until Lacey arrived to whisk him north.

The news ticker continued its tireless, never-ending march.

RECORD LATE SUMMER HEAT WAVE TO CONTINUE

TODAY'S FORECAST: HIGH 109 F, LOW 88 F

BRITISH GENERAL CHARGED IN MISSING TANK FIASCO

FIRES DESTROY HISTORIC SAN FRAN WAREHOUSE

NEW CLUES IN "BISHOP KILLER" CASE – GO TO CNN . COM!

FRENCH OFFICIALS TO RELEASE STATEMENT ON PLANE CRASH

. . . And so on. And on. And on.

And I sat, free of dreams and regrets, for a precious span of wasted time.

Just as that hit of exquisite cannabis smoke was beginning to wear off, the television abruptly went black. The perched fans thrummed pathetically, then spun to a halt. At some distant juncture in the air conditioning ducts, a motor chugged mightily and fell silent.

An eerie, expectant quiet fell over the apartment.

Slowly, Stuart spoke. "Aw, piss."

"What is it?" I asked.

Stuart rose clumsily and trotted over to one of the open windows. He squinted out into the stifling cityscape beyond. "Brownout," he muttered. A pair of shrill, angry car horns drifted through the air. "Yeah. Shoulda known. Bullshit. The stoplight at the corner is out."

Allen stretched and grimaced. "Wow, that sucks. How long will the power be out?"

"Don't know," Stuart grumbled. "They usually last only a few minutes, but once, back in '05, I sat around in the dark for over two hours."

"I remember that," I said. I rubbed a finger over my dry lips. As I slowly came down, the heat seemed to leech through my skin and glower about my nerve endings. "That shit was brutal."

For the first time in over an hour, that curious _something_ began to nip at the back of my mind. A fuzzy, itching sensation that wasn't quite déjà vu and wasn't quite anxiety. Jesus – stop it. It's the comedown messing with you. "Tequila Sunrise" indeed. Smooth up front, hell of a hangover. Just paranoia.

. . . No, that wasn't it.

As I watched Stuart bend farther to get a better look outside, the feeling grew more intense. Implacable. Like knowing that I had forgotten to say or do something. _Something_.

"Wonderful," Allen said, standing. He adjusted his glasses. "I'm sure this will make the drive all sorts of fun."

What was it? Goddammit. Like an insect, chewing on the roof of my brain.

Stuart shook his head. "Naw. They're usually pretty local. Besides," he screwed his voice into an unnerving falsetto, "more time to talk with schmoogums."

"Very funny, cockmaster," Allen smirked.

I sat bolt upright. "Shit!" I yelped.

Both faces turned to me with sudden confusion. "What?" Allen asked.

"I completely forgot to turn off the Nintendo last night!" Yes. _That _was it. Had to be. I got up and started off toward my bedroom.

"Moot point now," Stuart said.

"Yeah," I said. "But I don't want it on when the power comes back up. I might forget it again, and God knows what the heat might do to it. It's nearly an antique, after all."

I heard Stuart's bemused laughter as I moved down the short hall and turned into my room.

Despite the epiphany, that sense of jittery tension still clutched my body. As the day waned, a stagnant gloom had gathered in my bedroom. A lonely shaft of dusty light fell through the half-closed blinds on the opposite end of the room. Besides the sound of Stuart and Allen's voices, all was still and quiet.

I walked to the corner cabinet, pulled open the glass door, and pushed the power button on the old NES. Black to black. I stood motionless for a moment, as if waiting.

A volley of thick laughter resounded in the living room.

Sighing, I turned to join my roommates.

Something glimmered in the descending light cast by the window.

I stopped mid-motion.

Something. It lay on the floor, in the space between the bed and the wall. Half of it disappeared beneath the bed. The other half shimmered dully, resting on the carpet in front of my beaten nightstand.

A scream – an absolute howl of despair – rose up and wavered between my aching vocal cords.

It was the Master Sword.


	20. 20

**20**

When I was ten years old, I experienced a bout of sleep paralysis. For a period of about two months, I would periodically jolt awake before dawn. "Awake" is a relative term – during those moments, consciousness seemed a blank illusion. The room about me, bathed in a kind of nether twilight, stretched on and out like a sepulchral corridor. Everyday objects leaned forward and took on an air of fell menace. My body seized and twitched.

In those hellish moments, a vague and flowing shadow seemed to rise up before my bed. It spun and undulated like misty threads of cotton candy, until it had taken the rough shape of a man in a cloak. And then, wearing a halo of pale light, it would lean in toward my bed and cackle.

No matter my desperation, I could not move my body. I was completely trapped, pinned to my bed like a butterfly under glass. It was only as the figure came almost to my face that I was able to scream.

As I stared at the sword lying oh-so-innocuously on my bedroom floor, that sensation – utter paralysis and helpless terror – washed over me. I stood, mouth agape and lips trembling. My fingers curled, frozen now, attempting blindly to clutch at something that wasn't there. My vision blurred; corners lost definition; colors bled together. I felt my skin start to tingle, as if I had just received a mild electric shock.

I swooned. Gray mist rolled across my vision and danced with soot-black spots. My body teetered on the edge of collapse.

I tried to scream, but couldn't. Instead, I sputtered quietly like some soft-brained lunatic in a straightjacket. I tried to flail out and keep myself from falling, but couldn't. Instead, my knees locked and my arms went rigid.

For a moment, I was certain that I would tip over and smack my forehead on the corner of my bed. It was small relief that my body remained frozen and upright, statue-like.

Dread. An all-encompassing, smothering dread rose from my feet and spread like a toxic plume throughout my body. A cold, dense feeling. Mercury in the veins.

No. Nonononononono. It wasn't there. Couldn't be there. The way the anemic light slid down the blade was wrong. No. The way the metal sunk into the carpet and made a slow indent in the fibers was wrong. No. But – it – it _wasn't_ wrong. It was _too right_. Too real.

Still dreaming. But – why – how – no sense at all –

Eyes itching. Needed to blink. Couldn't.

The drugs. Hot as the Fifth Circle of Hell in there. The air swatted at my face like a burning paddle. The drugs! It had to be. It could only be. It had to be, or – or – or _else_.

Or else what?

Insanity. Pure mainline mental illness, motherfucker. A case of the heebie-jeebies, rockin' and reelin'. Paranoid schizophrenia like nobody's business. Soon the sword would ask me to kill my roommates and wear their heads for hats, and it would be _good_, all _good_, yes and –

Get a hold of yourself.

The light fell across red, dappled stains on one of the sword's edges.

_You _get a hold of yourself. Fuck!

Calm down, just calm –

How? _How_?!

I was suddenly aware that I wasn't breathing. Even my lungs had seized and gone still.

Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. Please let me wake up again . . . Please let me wake up in bed or on a street corner or even in a nuthouse, because this is too much, too . . .

Please. Please try. Try to take this head-on. No matter how hard I wished, I couldn't retreat from this.

The paralysis broke. I gasped. I raised a numb hand, the arm attached to it as stiff as a creaking brass statue. My palm touched the wall and steadied my swaying body.

I managed – somehow – to lug my stunned body away from the wall and turn toward the door. My eyes never left the sword in the corner. Its presence remained maddeningly constant. Even when I had gone far enough that it disappeared behind the bulk of the bed, I could feel it sitting there nestled amongst the beige strands of carpet.

When I reached the door, I curled my fingers around the frame and tried to speak. All that emerged from my mouth was a kind of ragged croak.

"Hey Linus – you fall in?" Stuart's voice reached me as if it were echoing from another dimension.

"Uh – wuah," I said. My idiot tongue tangled and flopped around whatever it was I had intended to say. I squeezed my eyes shut, felt tears of frustration well at their edges, and counted slowly to five. At five, I opened my dry lips and tried again.

"Hey Allen!" I called out. My voice felt like it might crack at any moment. "What the hell is in this stuff?"

"Uhhh . . . that's nothing but pure, organically grown pot, amigo. What's the matter – you seein' trails?"

Other than the sudden appearance of a previously fictional object, my vision was just fine, thank you. "You sure?" I asked.

"Are you okay, man?" Allen sounded slightly concerned – a rare emotion on his part.

"Oh – uh – yeah." Unconvincing. "I think it's doubling back on me."

In fact, any lingering sensation of being high had vanished.

"No shit?" Allen called from across the apartment.

"No shit," I confirmed. I tried to drop my voice so that it sounded as dopey as possible.

"Pussy!" Stuart laughed. His grin seemed to float along with his disembodied voice.

What happened next . . . Well, at this point you are probably sick of me questioning my own past judgments. Some of my memories are so vivid that I can almost taste the sweat running along my upper lip. Others – like my motivation while pulling out the Master Sword, or the train of thought as I stood at that bedroom door – still confound me in quiet moments. I suddenly faced a crossroads, and I made a decision that would shape every moment of the rest of my life. I don't regret that decision. I no longer regret much of anything.

. . . But I do question. I question a lot of things.

For instance, I wonder why my lips parted and words formed in my mind. I question why those words, so simple and so direct, never came together or found a voice.

It would have gone like this: "Hey guys – I want you to come look at something." And then Allen and Stuart would tromp into my room, following my outstretched index finger to the Master Sword. They would either see it, or wouldn't.

If they did, then – oh! Happy day! Happy fucking day! We three would sit and scratch our chins in collective drug-addled confusion. From whence had this blade come? Where was it headed? Who knew? We certainly didn't. And there would be beautiful laughter.

And if the sword went unseen, then at least my fears would be confirmed. I was flashing back, tripping, insane, bonkers, several pancakes short of a stack, batshit, and totally fucko bazoo.

But my lips clamped shut. I never asked the question. The words died.

Why?

Even though the point has since become cosmically moot, I still ask myself that from time to time. Why didn't I call out? It could have been my salvation from madness. Then again, it could have just as easily been my damnation.

Ahh . . . And there's the rub. Fear. Fear of the near-inevitability that I had gone insane. A moment's consideration of a shattered future filled with anti-psychotic drugs and hospital wings painted in soothing colors was probably all that it took. Fear, then hesitation. And then some kind of bizarre denial, setting in like shellshock or dementia.

My stiff legs propelled me out of my room and into the dim hallway. The brownout seemed like it had started a decade ago. I passed into the common area and toward the front door. Stuart and Allen were once again draped over the couch, sweating like men in a sauna. Their heads turned to track my movement.

"You sure you're okay?" Allen asked. "You look dehydrated or something."

I mumbled, "I'm fine. I just need some fresh air." I pulled open the front door and hastily exited the apartment.

Outside, the heat was like a cudgel. It rolled off the naked pavement like invisible flames, buffeting my skin and narrowing my eyes. The blinding mid-afternoon sun reigned terrible and alone over a cloudless sky. I felt that if I stayed outside, I might begin to char and curl at the edges.

I stood at the entrance to the apartment building, taking in the sun's mute punishment. Out in the streets, the dead black eyes of traffic lights looked out over confused lines of traffic. As I looked left and right, I saw other residents of the complex standing at open doorways, hands on hips and foreheads beaded with furious sweat. A dog – some kind of brown setter mix – padded past me from the right, its long pink tongue lolling to the side. It strode panting up the sidewalk and around the corner of the building, into the alleyway where the residents pitched their garbage into an open trash bin. It must have stunk wonderfully there, in the greasy shade between the buildings.

I took a few deep breaths of blistering city air. Real. Very real. So: Not dreaming. Oh, fuck off – you already knew that.

Now what?

Down the row of apartment doors, a fat man in a polo shirt squinted at the sun. He absently sipped at a water-beaded glass of dark liquid.

Yes. That was a fantastic idea.

I shivered in the pounding sunlight. Fighting back the constricting anxiety that now seeped into my muscles, I turned and went back into the apartment.

As I marched through the gloom-laden living room and into the kitchenette, my movements were once again followed by Stuart and Allen. Their solemn monks' faces and knitted brows only served to unnerve me further. I threw open the silent freezer and grabbed a fistful of ice cubes.

"You sure you're all right?" Stuart asked. The humor had drained out of his voice.

"I said I was fine," I said flatly. "Just a bit stoned."

Stuart shook his head. "You, uh, don't look stoned. Maybe you should sit down and drink some water, man. You said that you were feeling those bruises."

"Good idea," I said. "I need . . . First I need to go get something in my room."

Stuart and Allen exchanged confused, incredulous glances.

Water melted from the ice in my hand, trickling out across my palm and over my wrist. It was bitingly, refreshingly cold.

"Fine – I want a drink," I conceded.

"After last night?" Stuart asked.

"Hair of the dog." I chuckled nervously. "Besides, if this brownout shit lasts much longer, we won't have any ice at all soon. Best use it while we can."

A pair of half-hearted nods bade me farewell. I walked, ice in hand, to my room. I cracked the door behind me.

A sigh, a whimper, a whiff of bitter resignation. I crossed the room so that I could see the carpet in front of the bedside dresser.

It was still there. Blue hilt and dull silver blade, tapering slightly at the base so that a portion just above the cross-guard was slimmer than the rest. The golden Triforce insignia winked at me sadistically. Rusty splotches ran across one edge of the blade in Pollock patterns.

Amazingly, it only took one deep breath to keep from fainting.

I climbed up awkwardly over the corner of my bed, crawled along its left edge, and reached down to the cabinet door at the bottom of the nightstand. As before, I never let the sword out of my sight, as if it turning away might invite it to float into the air and stab me in the spine.

From the nightstand cabinet I retrieved a sparkling-clean glass tumbler, into which I deposited the handful of melting ice. Next, I pulled from the depths a squat, square bottle that sloshed with caramel-brown liquor. Its black-on-gold label proclaimed:

**Kauffman's #6  
Premium Kentucky Bourbon  
America's Finest Since 1876**

I unscrewed the cap and poured a glug-glugging portion of strong whiskey onto the ice. After I was satisfied with the amount, I deposited the bottle back in my personal stash. I raised the glass to my lips, waited a moment, and sipped expectantly.

The whiskey bit the tongue smooth and burned the throat smoother. Sweet and dark and tasting of summer nights spent on balconies. Good. Too good for this kind of awful, stagnantly hot day. Not good enough to banish the sword beneath me, which remained constant.

After another sip, I dangled one shaking bare foot off the side of the bed. I lowered it slowly, slowly, _slowly_, toward the flat of the sword's blade. I let the tip of my big toe poke out. It found the sword distressingly solid. The same slick, strangely cool metal that had haunted the end of my dream. Had it been a dream? Of course. Of course, you lunatic.

My toe caressed up the length of the blade, toward its tip.

Lord God. It was real. At least, it was real to _me_. For all I knew, my toe hovered an inch above bare carpet. Soon enough, the imps and hobgoblins of last night's dream would come through the window to chase me into a life of small white rooms and therapy sessions.

I pressed my toes against the gleaming steel. It did not yield. No carpet fibers greeted my soft soles. A very convincing delusion, this.

I gulped at the burning liquor. A certain detachment – that sense of grotesque inevitability – filled me. As if in a daze, I reached down with my free hand and slipped my fingers around the grip of the sword. Weighty as anything I had ever experienced. Without thinking, I pulled the sword toward the bed, and then messily pushed it under. It made a quiet, slithery sound as the metal slid across the carpeting. I nudged it further under the shadow of the bed frame, until it had disappeared. When I released the grip, I could almost pretend that it had ceased to exist entirely.

I sucked greedily at the bourbon. Kauffmans #6: The choice drink of all madmen! Only thirty dollars a bottle at the hospital commissary. Throw it back with the orderlies and other head-cases today!

There came a moment of despair. Even out of sight, I could somehow feel the Master Sword's presence. It sat patiently under my bed . . . waiting. It seemed to radiate a silent magnetic field that itched at the back of my mind and made the hairs on my arms stand on end.

No. Fuck that. You're insane. You're brain-damaged. You'll start gibbering and painting the walls with your own shit soon enough.

I fought back the urge to weep.

With one last twist of the wrist, I downed the rest of the drink I had so hastily poured. I usually kept that bottle and tumbler for special occasions. It suddenly occurred to me that the first day of a lifelong mental illness might be a special occasion indeed.

Somewhere in the ceiling above, a motor thrummed to life. Out in the living room, the television began to blare with the lugubrious voices of newscasters. The fans returned to their endless humming conversations.

Stuart yelled, "Linus! The power's back on!"

I noticed that, Stew. With a grimace, I slurped one last pathetic time at the ice in the tumbler. I set it down on a coaster strategically placed on the corner of my nightstand. The remaining ice clinked musically against the glass. I leapt off the bed.

I returned to the living room and proceeded to smoke a few more bowls of weed. The grass only succeeded in making me sleepy and paranoid. The hours passed by in agonizing, doom-ridden succession.

Later that afternoon, mysterious and unseen Lacey called Allen on his cell phone. Minutes later, he departed through the front door for northern climes.

I watched television. Stuart ordered a pizza. I ate two slices with the rancid fear that I might throw them back up at any moment.

As darkness fell and the strangling heat refused to dissipate, I became more and more convinced that I would be institutionalized within the week. That's all I had left. I might as well start a countdown.

Stuart put on a movie that I only watched fitfully and from the corner of one twitching eye. After he went to bed, I stayed up and stared at late night cartoons without actually watching them.

I waited until I was sure that Allen would not return, then laid a blanket on the couch. I fell asleep with the babbling rush of LA traffic in my ears.


	21. 21

**21**

I dreamed. Words swam through the dark well of sleep.

"Are you certain of this?" Deep and sure. A full white grin in the void.

_It's too late to go back now_. A strange, sinuous voice. Like dark music etched on bone.

A third voice, vaguely muffled and oddly familiar: "Never too late. If you want, boss, I can . . ."

_That won't be necessary_.

The first voice, hale and full: "He _is _the first to. . ."

_Yes_.

"And he has the sword. Proof positive – at least for –"

"Yes yes yes." The third voice cackled. "But, can he handle it? How long can he last? He's just a man. Barely a man. A kid. The woods nearly destroyed him."

_We have come this far . . ._

The first voice cautiously said, "And gambled, I suppose. I disagree – from what I saw, he handled it all well enough. Better than . . . Well, you know. Still, I do have my own misgivings. Can we just start over? If things don't work out?"

_In that event, we will have to proceed with my plans without him. It will be less enjoyable, but in the end it will be necessary. Unfortunately, time grows short._

"You keep saying that. What does it even mean?" A sense of unease grew in the timbre of the first voice.

_In due time, Latigo . . . In due time. In the meantime, watch this one for me. Make sure that he comes to his destiny. I will count on all of you to make sure that these will be times long remembered. Is that clear?_

Simultaneously, the first and third voices intoned, "Yes, sir."

_Good. Good. Gentlemen . . . we are going to have such glorious fun._

And then there was laughter, flat and emotionless as an arctic wind.


	22. 22

**22**

On Sunday, I got stoned, played video games with Stuart, and never once looked under my bed.


	23. 23

**23**

One of the few perks of my menial job was basic medical coverage. I wouldn't be able to commission eye surgery any time soon, but it at least covered the majority of a trip to the general practitioner's office.

Thus, I took half of Monday off to see to my injuries.

I lied magnificently to my supervisor. Moira was a middle-aged, dissatisfied woman trapped in the endless career labyrinth of middle management. When I approached her, she looked at me the same way one might examine a dead cat in the middle of the road.

"Yeah . . . this," I began, pointing to my eye and grinning sheepishly. What followed was a harrowing and rather detailed account of downing a few too many beers and taking a swim at Jeff's party. According to this version of the story, an ill-advised attempt to impress other swimmers ended with a slick pool edge, a flailing of arms, a concrete-slapping tumble, and a cloud of waterborne blood.

Sometimes, I find myself fantasizing about what would have happened if that had been the actual sequence of events that night. Perhaps in some strange alternate universe, that's exactly how it went. Instead of getting drunk and fighting Bryan, I got drunk and decided it was a good night to splash about in the pool. Instead of taking a fist to the face and then smashing Bryan's nose with my elbow, I sloppily declared "Cannonball!" and dashed toward the puddle-strewn lip of the pool. Like all daydreams, this one eventually disintegrates into silly wish-fulfillment – instead of ending the night with a terrible dream-journey into a world inspired by _The Legend of Zelda_, I ended up in the arms of a well-endowed and very sympathetic fellow swimmer.

Ah, the shallow dreams of youth.

Except . . . heh. Youth indeed.

As I finished telling my story to Moira, I rubbed my chest apprehensively and stated that I might have cracked something. Moira's initial slit-eyed suspicion melted into fawning sympathy. Of course I could go see a doctor. Of course.

Score.

That last detail – my concern over possible broken ribs – was genuine. Over the last two days, the pulsing ache had never quite subsided. Each breath and complicated movement swept bright, groaning pain through my trunk and abdomen. After the constant applications of cannabis and Tylenol had failed to dull the pain, a visit to the sawbones seemed a fine idea indeed.

I rode an empty bus out to my general practitioner's office early that afternoon. I waited patiently in the small examining room, listening to the buzzy hum of fluorescent lights and tapping my fingers nervously. I had hoped to see my old childhood practitioner, Dr. Srivas – a plump, balding Indian man who smelled of curry and Old Spice. When the door finally opened, I was instead greeted by a stocky young physician's assistant who introduced herself as "Carol." It was a small miracle that I was able to get an appointment on such short notice, so I didn't mind the lack of proper abbreviations on her nametag.

Unlike my conversation with Moira, I did not lie to Carol the PA. However, I did _omit_. I poured out a basic version of the story of the brawl, making sure to emphasize the savage blows that Bryan had landed on my ribs. It was simple enough to leave out that I was _fairly _certain that I had impacted against a tree branch later that night, during my descent into a fantasy world where I ran from monsters and eventually retrieved a magic sword. After all, my certainty wasn't any kind of certainty at all. That's why I asked her to take X-rays of my head as well as my chest.

Carol paused between pen jots on her clipboard. She looked at me with dull, incredulous eyes. "Have you been experiencing any dizziness? Headaches that won't go away? Fatigue or sudden fainting?"

"I've had a couple of bad dizzy spells," I admitted. Not a lie. Just not recently.

"If you're worried about a concussion -"

"Or brain damage," I ventured. I forced nervous laughter. Just joking. I swear that I'm just joking.

Carol stared at me disapprovingly for a moment, and then continued, "Well, if you're really worried about either of those, we can do an MRI. However, I have to warn you that unless you've been significantly dizzy, confused, or experiencing blackouts, it's not worth it. After all, it's goddamn expensive."

I considered it. "Then we can probably skip that," I sighed.

Two hours later, the finished X-rays told an informative but predictable story: Two of my mid-torso ribs had hairline fractures, but my skull was fine.

As she flipped the blue-gray sheets up onto the light board for study, Carol remarked, "This guy must have been as big as a house."

"Yeah," I said. "He looked like he works out."

I returned home with my chest bandaged and a sample bottle of painkillers in one hand. Carol had admonished me to rest as much as possible, to sleep on my back, and to avoid the kind of idiocy that had led to the injury in the first place. Right-o, I thought. You don't have to tell me twice.

By the time I climbed back on the bus for the trip home, the day had begun to wane. The steel and cement canyons of the city sweltered like the insides of some titanic furnace. A pall of thick brown sat on the horizon. The hills appeared as if through a great mirage, wavering like distant dreamscapes.

As the bus ride stretched on and on, I felt the inevitability of my situation start to catch up to me. My grip on the medicine bottle tightened. The hard plastic began to distend beneath my fingers. The first bouncing little thought careened about my head, birthing others along its chaotic path. Soon enough, my brain was a cacophony of shrieking points, counterpoints, and worrying images. The full weight of it – and all the relevant implications – sat upon me like a lead shroud.

A dreamlike panic – not unlike what I felt during that terrifying chase through the woods – threatened to burst out and overwhelm me. At each stop, I resisted the growing urge to bolt off the bus and dash down the street. Anything to take me away from the thing that was growing closer . . . and closer . . . and closer.

I was fucked. The epiphany didn't come to me in a flash. Rather, it emerged slowly, oozing toxic from the base of my spine and slithering up into the bottom of my brain. It spread like an oil stain and stuck like rancid grease. The more I considered, the more the tacky sense of sublimated panic and slow despair seemed to settle in and simply _take hold_

Fucked. No matter which way I spun it, this was going to end badly for me.

When I stepped off at the appointed stop, I felt like a portion of me had fled my body. I marched mechanically to the front door of the apartment and opened it with a sense of almost resigned terror. When nothing came roaring out at me with tentacles or spinning blades, the relief I felt was more like gelid apathy.

As I shut the door, I called out, "Hello?"

No answer but the familiar, incompetent _chugga-chug-chug _of the air conditioning.

Suddenly, the apartment seemed to stretch out and away from me. Angles twisted and shadows became yawning black pits. My head spun; my legs tangled; my hand shot out to balance my body against the wall. I felt slightly nauseous. Eyes closed, I waited for the dizzy spell to pass.

It took a minute or so, but I was able to stand back up without the aid of the wall's venerable support. I slid my briefcase down off my shoulder and let it fall to the floor with a _thunk_.

I walked into the living room and found it empty. "Hello?" I tried. No response. I was alone.

A quick inspection of the apartment revealed that Stuart had vanished. There was no note, but that was standard procedure in these cases. I didn't expect either of my roommates to ever keep me completely up-to-date on their whereabouts. Vague disappointment wrung through my shoulders as I realized that the dark green bong had disappeared along with him. Its absence left an almost tangible emptiness floating above the coffee table. Stuart might have stashed it in his room, but there was no way I was going to go searching through that pit.

It was just as well. I needed a clear head for what came next. I didn't _want _a clear head . . . but I did need it.

I sat down on the empty couch and folded my hands together. I took a very deep breath of stuffy air. I felt the sweat-soaked folds of my shirt cling slimily to my skin. I blinked at a stray hair that had swept away from my ponytail and now dangled limply before my eyes. I waited, as if for a sign.

None came.

I rose from the couch and wandered into the side hall. Lingering, I stared through the open door of my bedroom. It seemed very dark in there. Shadows tinted with growing dusk fire. Carefully (oh so carefully), I reached out through the doorframe and fumbled for the light switch. My finger folded over it, rested, and pulled upward. The strong dome light flared to brilliant life. It was almost disappointing to see the clean, mundane room that it illuminated.

I stood at the door with my arm outstretched through it, as if I were testing the air beyond some invisible veil. Suddenly, I felt very silly. It was just a room. Everything in it was just as I had left it. Everything save the theoretical object under my bed was as everyday and normal as the carpet beneath my feet. There was nothing to be afraid of here. You candyass.

I strode into my room and climbed awkwardly over my bed. After a moment of dull, terrified hesitation, I leaned over and craned my hand under the bed frame. I pawed about blindly.

For a moment, my heart threatened to rocket up my throat and explode out my mouth. I couldn't find the sword. It was gone!

And then my fingers brushed cool metal. The brief elation died instantaneously in a Hindenburg flash of despair. My taut, questing arm went limp and the rest of my body followed. My belly settled onto the bed with an airy _thwup_.

Still there. It was still there.

Goddammit.

In that moment, it was if all the fear and anxious horror that I had felt for nearly three days drained away . . . only to be replaced with an acute emptiness. I went numb. The emotional onslaught had finally overloaded my system, and I suppose that I simply shut down for a time.

I lay there for a while, letting my fingers trace up and down and back again across the unseen sword beneath the bed. They drifted over and passed along the razor edge of the blade. The soft pad of my index finger danced along the keen cutting threshold, never more than a light brush of the skin. With a movement that was almost erotic, my hand swept down and wrapped around the hilt of the sword. I dreamily pulled it from beneath the mattress and lifted it into the air.

Lying on my stomach and using only one arm, the angle of the sword's ascent was wobbly and awkward. Still, I couldn't help but feel a sort of fluttering awe take life in my chest. The blade, though duller than it had seemed in the forest, still caught the light in a way that made it glow almost incandescently. The golden embossed Triforce shone comfortingly.

I rolled over onto my back and strained my shoulder to hold the sword aloft above me. My wrist shook with its weight.

How could I be so frightened of something so benignly, subtly beautiful? The colors were faded and the blade's edge was chipped here and there . . . But this was a fine sword. When I examined it like this, the weight and heft and all the angles of its design felt somehow innately _right. _Like the previous feeling of unseen and sublime magnetism, the aesthetics of the blade were at once pleasing and unknowable.

I smiled for the first time in days.

It didn't last long. The pleasant, numbed reverie ended as the sword's awkward weight finally defeated my scrawny forearm. I rolled left and placed it on top of my bed. With a shuddery groan, I rose to my knees.

So: It was real.

Probably. Despite the sensation of surreal dissonance the Master Sword summoned in me, it felt and sounded and even smelled as solid as the walls around me. Were it not for the dried dark stains on its edge, I might have been tempted to test its taste, as well.

Now what?

Oh, that eternal nagging question. Now what, indeed. Jesus, what _could _I do?

I slid off the bed bonelessly. I was hungry. It was a disconnected, little-red-light-blinking-in-the-distance kind of hunger . . . But it was a start.

I ambled out to the kitchenette without any real sense of what I was going to do when I got there. The utter normality of the apartment cleared away some of the fog that had settled over my brain. Going through the motions of the old order was enough to sooth my limp nerves and bring me a step closer back to some conscious grasp on reality.

So: Having not made a major grocery run in some time, my options were limited. Unless Stuart had also absconded with them, there were two slices of pizza left over from Saturday . . . But I generally felt that such things had a short half-life. Perhaps peanut butter. Slice of ham. An egg – boiled or scrambled. I could plumb the depths of the frozen horror that was our freezer . . . Or . . .

I sniffed.

Goddammit, Stew.

I glanced to the corner, where the open plastic trash can brooded, overflowing. The ghostly pre-funk of rotting food matter wafted from the pile in waves. I sighed. I had gotten used to cleaning up after the filthy dishes, discarded candy wrappers, and random bits of detritus that Stuart left about the common areas of the apartment. However, I don't think that I would have ever acclimated to his passive refusal to take out the garbage. Argh.

I literally rolled up my sleeves, loosened my collar, and set about the dirty business at hand. A swoop, a stomp, a pull, and a twist. A cloud of disturbed reek. Just breathe through the mouth. See, Stew? It's not that hard. Easy as fucking pie.

I hauled the bag out the front door and hooked left down the sidewalk. The white noise rush of traffic resounded from everywhere and nowhere. The day smoldered at its edges. I turned down the alleyway where the complex's trash bin waited.

The alley was awash in the gore-red of dusk. A hot, cloying stench – like old hot dog grease – resonated through the dark, narrow space between the buildings. Just beyond the open dumpster, the opposite end of the alley rippled with rising heat. A bloody, liquid horizon.

I paused. The bin stood some forty feet away, black in stark silhouette relief.

Something was moving there. Slowly and deliberately. Something small and strange moved along the upper lip of the trash bin.

A burst of furnace wind blew down the alley and stirred up a crumpled tissue at my feet. I smelled sharp salt and a low hint of electric copper.

Something moving. The red glow fell over a round form and stony gray ridges. A slender black-on-red shape slithered from beneath it and rose questioningly into the air. Testing the wind. Tasting the currents. A glistening, angry eye opened. It spun about madly, then focused fully on me.

My guts fell away into a yawning abyss. I swallowed and tasted the greasy, rank air.

Other things, now. Familiar. Not just one. At least three . . . no, four . . . or five . . . mottled gray shells climbing awkwardly over the sides of the dumpster. Some were no larger than a closed fist; the largest, perched near the bottom edge of the bin, was the size of a solid medicine ball. As it reached the base of the bin, it extended a tentative purple tentacle . . . then drew back suddenly, repulsed by the burning tarmac.

The eye still stared at me. Hateful. Knowing. I stared back, paralyzed, fascinated, numbed, terrified. The trash bag swung limply from my hand like a foul censer.

_Ting!_

Metal tapped lightly against metal.

_Ting-tong!_

My eyes traced down from the creature still sitting atop the bin to the street behind it. The furthest end of the alley opened west, as if into a burning hellscape of fresh blood reds and charred silhouette black. A figure stood there, lingering at the corner of the dumpster.

The lowest octorock again tried to crawl out onto the street. Again, it withdrew with palpable revulsion.

Another gust of stifling, meat-stinking wind. A tabard billowed about the silent figure. It raised a hand. In it was a long, beveled instrument – a blade with a curved edge and blunt tip. A machete. The figure extended its arm and playfully tapped its weapon against the side of the dumpster.

_Tong! Tong! Tong!_

The bin resounded like some obscene church bell. With each resonation, the octorocks slithering about its sides paused as if frightened . . . or as if they were listening.

The figure stepped forward, deeper into silhouette. Heavy boots padded against the blacktop. I saw a shock of hair and dark, glittering eyes. It was tall – taller than me, with shoulders reaching almost to the top of the dumpster. Its face, cast in alley shadows, seemed somehow _wrong_, as if it were doubly obscured by some smooth plate or mask.

Oh God. Oh _God_.

The trash bag dropped from my hand. I shook.

Another tap of the machete, harder now: _Tang tong TANG!_ The dark figure pulled the long blade away from the side of the bin, then slowly swung its outstretched tip until it pointed directly at me. I stared down its extended length. My gaze darted upward and met that of the steady, loathing eye of the highest octorock.

My mouth fell open. I felt the fetal warble of a scream, rising to meet my lips and teeth and tongue.

I broke. Feet shuffling against the waxy blacktop, I spun about and dashed from the alleyway. Delighted, sadistic laughter followed after me. The dark figure and the pulsing, impossible mollusks fell away and disappeared.

I didn't stop until I had successfully whipped through my front door and engaged all the necessary locks. Even then, I walked thunderously through the apartment and into my room. The Master Sword still lay on my bed, its earlier welcoming aura all but forgotten. I grabbed the sword, opened the closet next to the bedroom door, and hurled it into the back. I slammed the closet shut and collapsed onto my bed.

What . . . What had just happened?

My fingers and forearms trembled. I felt somehow cold despite the gnawing heat.

What was going on?

I was going insane – that's what was going on. Strong hallucinations, almost as tangible as reality itself. The floating brain all over again. Sword? What sword? The same as the monsters oozing about the trash bin. Impossible. And now, shadowed manifestations of the subconscious were birthing from the aether . . . Belching out like wailing phantoms to . . . to . . . oh sweet Jesus . . .

Stop.

Please.

My head fell into my outstretched hands.

Fucked. I was fucked. The countdown to true madness continued unabated.

I couldn't go on like this. I had to do something. Anything. That night.

. . . I had to do something.

Instead I ate the remaining piece of cold pizza and watched _Robocop_.


	24. 24

**24**

Despite Jeff's dire prophecy, I never did hear from the police about the fight with Bryan. Each evening after the fated Friday night, I more than half-expected to receive a visit from Los Angeles' Finest. On Tuesday night I was greeted not by the police, but by the reappearance of Stuart Ramirez.

He arrived at our doorstep at seven-thirty, paper bags of groceries held tight under each arm. "Hey dude," he greeted, then shuffled under the doorframe and toward the kitchenette.

"Where have you been?" I asked curtly.

"Oh, out and about. Y'know. Had to get some more grass, so I decided to chill with a guy I knew in the service." He set the bags on the counter and began to unpack lunch meat, packaged bread, bags of apples, boxes of individual cupcakes, and nacho corn chips.

I watched him with a sour expression. "Can I borrow your cell phone?"

Bending down to shove cold cuts into the refrigerator, Stuart asked, "Why do you need it?"

"I want to call my sister."

"In Seattle?"

"Dude, we don't have a land line. Also, don't you get free long distance?" I was getting impatient. I had waited for Stuart since arriving home with the singular intention of borrowing his phone.

Stuart looked up with a nonplussed expression. "Oh yeah," he intoned. He plunged one hand into his pants pocket. It emerged with a basic green cell phone. Stuart stood and handed it off to me. "Not too long, huh?" he admonished.

Whatever, I thought. I marched into my bedroom and shut the door behind me. Regarding the closet next to me with mild disgust, I sat down on my bed and opened the phone. I dialed my sister's number as quickly as possible, hoping to outrun the inner voice jabbering that this was a bad idea.

On the third ring, the other end of the connection clicked. A basso voice fell across the phone line. "Y'ello?"

"Hey," I responded tentatively. "Tim? This is Linus."

"Oh! Hey Linus. Yeah, this is Tim. You want to talk to Lira?"

I first met Timothy Sanders at my father's funeral. He had been dating my sister for going on a year and a half at that point, but distance and the harried madness of each of our schedules had kept us from a face-to-face introduction. He stood at my sister's side looking sad and uncomfortable. Tim himself was a short, husky black man who wore a crisp suit and ill-fitting shoes. On that hot, awful day we shook hands and exchanged the barest pleasantries. It was only later that we were able to get to know each other, lounging in lawn chairs and sipping beer on a balmy Fourth of July in Seattle.

Tim and Lira grew much closer during the dark times surrounding Dad's death. Midway through their respective stints in nursing school, he had proposed. Nearly two increasingly impatient years had passed since then, with no set date for a wedding in sight.

"Yeah man. Is she in?"

"Of course, of course. One moment." I heard fumbling movement; the telephone receiver bumped and prodded against something. After a moment, Tim's disembodied voice asked, "So, how are you doing?"

"Oh – you know. Fine, really. Just workin'. Hanging out."

"You are very boring, you know that?" Tim chuckled. I heard him pull away from the phone and partially cover the receiver with his fingers. His muffled voice said, "Lira – it's your brother."

A higher, smoother voice said something incomprehensible. Then: "Linus! How are you?"

My big sister's cheerful voice evoked her image as it bounced over the telephone. In her bright vowels and breathless intonation I could see the sparkle of her eyes and hear the smile on her apple dumpling cheeks. I pictured her as I had last seen her more than six months ago – brushing fine brown hair from her forehead and laughing through her nose.

I smiled faintly. "Fine, fine. Okay, really."

"Just okay?"

"Oh, you know. I'm tired. Long day at work." I yawned theatrically.

"Awww." Lira giggled. The sound warbled and buzzed over the connection.

"You sound out of breath," I said. "Are you exercising or something?"

"Yep!" Lira chirped. "On the treadmill. Both Tim and I could shed a few pounds."

Somewhere in the background, I heard Tim chuff, "Says you!"

Lira laughed, pulled away from the phone for a moment, and yelled, "Shut up! Long distance. And you know that I want to look good in my wedding dress!"

Hundreds of miles away, a sound of incredulity.

My sister returned to the phone. "Anyway, anyway. What's up?"

"Nothing much. I just have a weird medical question for you. Mostly trivia." My gaze settled on the closet door. Yes. Just trivia.

"Oh, come on. Don't you ever want to catch up with your big sister?"

My smile grew. "Hey! We can catch up. We're caught up, I mean. There's literally nothing new on my end." At any other time, this wouldn't have been such an egregious lie. Things had changed so little in my life that the exchange of stories between myself and Lira always seemed very one-sided. "Well," I said, deciding to pepper the pot with a little truth, "I _did _get into a fight with a guy last Friday."

"No!" Lira gasped. "You? What happened?"

"Usual bullshit. I was, uh," I laughed nervously, "kinda sauced. A guy was treating his girlfriend badly -"

"How so?" Lira interrupted.

I sighed. "Oh, he was really drunk and she wanted to leave. He threw a shit-fit and started to really yell and grab at her. So I swept in like some conquering fucking hero and ended up brawling him." I felt a mixture of pride and deep embarrassment. Lira was one of the few people whose judgment I still cared about.

"Jee-zus, Linus! Are you okay, at least?"

"A couple of cracked ribs and a black eye. Um . . . don't tell Mom?"

"God, neither of us would hear the end of it. Jesus! That's crazy. Did he lay you out, then?"

I grinned triumphantly. "Nope. He messed me up, but I managed to mess him up worse. I guess I'm lucky that he didn't press charges. Then again," I said thoughtfully, "he _did _throw the first punch."

"I'm just glad you're not in a coma. There's a kid in my wing right now with a broken skull. Got it kicked in by a bunch of gang-bangers or something. Horrible mess. That could have been you, ya' know." Her voice had calmed and slowed down considerably. What I heard now was probably very close to the voice she used with patients. "Is that why you have a medical question?"

I started to speak, then made an ill-advised pause. I could lay it all out, right then and there. Stop the constant verbal jujitsu and just level with someone. If it were to be anyone in the world, it would be Lira. Three years older and almost my polar opposite in every way, she and I had nonetheless been close growing up. If anyone could understand and empathize with what I was going through – even if it was from a purely medical standpoint – it was her. She could help. She _would _help. Lira would take my shoulder and lead me through this.

"No," I said.

I couldn't do it.

In that moment – that single pause in syllables – I hesitated. Unlike my hesitation with Stuart and Allen, this was borne not only of fear, but also of love for my sister. The fact of the matter was that my big sister was _happy_. Unlike me, she had found an anchor in the wake of our shared tragedy. She had moved past it more quickly and completely than I had, and had gone on to make a fine life. Lira lived out her small but potent dreams as readily as I ignored mine and let them wither. And to introduce more familial heartbreak into her life seemed more than just unfair; in that moment, it felt absolutely monstrous.

So I lied. Or rather, I continued to lie.

"No," I continued, "I was just thinking about Dad a couple of days ago while I was watching this story on TV. The Learning Channel or some shit."

"Uh huh," Lira responded. She sounded suddenly cautious.

"Anyway, the piece was on a guy who kept experiencing these really powerful, realistic hallucinations. He checked himself into an institution, but it turned out to be some bizarre kind of epilepsy." I was on full-auto now, making shit up as I blindly barreled forward.

"I've never heard of that," Lira said.

"Well . . . It was kind of new to everyone, I think. Anyway, it made me think about Dad, and how the doctors thought he might have some kind of late-onset epilepsy at first. And then it turned out to be the tumor, right?"

Clearly uncomfortable, Lira said, "Right."

"So . . . do you remember him ever hallucinating? Up near the end?" I failed to mask the desperation that crept into my voice.

For several agonizing moments, I heard the measured hiss of Lira's breathing . . . and nothing else. At last, she said, "Linus, I'm not really following you. Are you asking if Dad's seizures caused him to hallucinate?"

"No. Well, sort of. I guess I'm really asking whether a brain tumor can cause hallucinations, and if Dad hallucinated because of his."

"Oh." The sudden, measured tone of Lira's speech made me want to hang up the phone and crawl under the bed. "Well, it really depends. I suppose that cancer in a certain portion of the brain could cause hallucinations. It's all context. Really, I'd lean toward 'No.' As for Dad . . . well, you were there too."

"Not as much as you were," I said quietly.

"In that case . . . I never heard him say that he was experiencing anything out of the ordinary." Lira drew a deep, shuddery breath. "Linus, what is this really about?"

"I, I was just curious. Really."

"Seriously? You don't sound curious, Linus. You sound terrified." What she said next was as obviously painful for her to say as it was for me to hear: "Are you still using drugs, Linus?"

It took me a moment to answer. When I heard the implied disappointment in her question, it felt as if a screwdriver had begun to carefully work its way into my abdomen. "Yes," I admitted. "But nothing heavy. Just pot. It's nothing."

"No – it's something," Lira sighed. "Be honest with me, bro: Have _you _been hallucinating?"

God, was this hard. My entire world shrank down to that bed and that cell phone. "Yes," I managed.

"And you swear that you haven't been taking anything stronger than marijuana?"

"Not lately."

I could hear her wince. Her voice became thin and wiry. "Not _lately_? Linus, please be honest with me."

"I am!" I blurted. "I swear I am. And what . . . well, what's been going on . . ." My throat felt heavy. My vision blurred with tears. Dammit man. Pull it together. "I've just been . . . seeing some things. Very . . . very vivid. And, and I don't really know how to handle it."

Carefully, quietly, Lira said, "And you wanted to know if it might be a brain tumor."

I sniffled and wiped at my eyes. The back of my hand came away slick. "I know. Stupid, huh?"

"No," Lira whispered. "No, it's not. But I can almost guarantee you that it's not cancer, Linus."

This should have been cause for celebration on my part. The fell horror of that possibility had been a shadow at my back for almost two days.

"Bro . . ." Lira continued. "I know that you're going through some tough times. I know that you're not where you want to be."

"Lira . . ."

"No – let me finish. Please. Maybe you should get some help. And if you don't want that, then at least try to be honest with me, okay? I love you, Linus. And I believe in you. I know that you're really a smart, talented guy. You just need to let go of everything that's holding you down."

I let the tears come freely now, but refused to make a sound.

"So: You need to get off the drugs," Lira whispered. "And if you need help with that, call me. I know people – people back in Orange County and here in Seattle, too. It's all right if you can't do this on your own."

"Thank you," I said. "But I think that it will work itself out. Always –_snif_ – does."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah," I smiled. A tear rolled over my lip and onto my teeth. I tasted hot salt. "We'll just have to see what happens."

Sounding miserable, Lira whispered so low that it was almost a squeak. "Please call me? Soon?"

"I will," I acknowledged. "I will. I love ya', sis."

Before she could respond in kind, I flipped the cell phone closed.

So much for not breaking her heart.

I ran my palms across my face, wiping away the slimy remains of my tears. I stared balefully at the closet door. After a time, I returned to the living room to give Stuart his phone back.

At around nine o' clock, the power went out again. A cloying, tarry darkness fell across the apartment.

By that point, I was busy ignoring my sister's advice. Stuart rolled a long, tightly-packed blunt and had lit it just before the world had plunged into blackness. Its weak red tip was the only light in the entirety of the apartment.

Stuart sprawled out on the living room floor while I flopped backward into the welcoming cushions of the couch. We lay there in the hot dark, passing the doobie back and forth and speaking of increasingly stoned things. No matter how much I smoked, the conversation with Lira and all its attendant conclusions continued to linger in my mind. I thought about the sword in my closet and the terrifying vision I had seen in the alleyway. I remembered each step of the dream journey through those deep, lost woods. I considered how I had spilled the moblin-thing's blood – how it had looked in the twilight, stinking of warm copper and sublimated terror.

I heard Stuart roll over, and suddenly the weed-stinking hot cherry of the roach appeared before my face. I plucked it from his hand and took a long drag. The ember grew bright and angry. Its glow illuminated the spindly lengths of my fingers. After exhaling the harsh vapors, I handed the blunt back to Stuart.

"I've been thinking a lot about the nature of reality," I said.

Oh boy – here we go. Just as when I drank heavily, I sometimes developed a casual Other Self while smoking marijuana. As I began to speak, that Other Me leaned back in bemused, half-grinning silence.

"Oh?" Stuart exhaled.

"Yeah. Just musing. Thinking about how we automatically accept everything we experience as real. How we think of ourselves as, y'know, discreet and unique beings that move through an unchanging world."

I turned over on my side and dug my body deeper into the couch cushions.

"I've been thinking that maybe it's not all as simple as that. Maybe it's the weed talking, but I'm starting to think that everything is a lot more nebulous and fluid than we assume. Everybody looks at reality in some unique way, and assumes that theirs is the only real interpretation. But I think, really, that there's no such thing. Not even really, a _shared_ reality."

"I suppose," Stuart said. The blunt's burning tip lit up like a distant red star.

"After all, we – and I mean people and personalities - are nothing but sensory input. Inner and outer signals interpreted by a conscious brain. The self and the world." I scratched up my left arm, enjoying the tingling paths my nails took through the tiny hairs and over the skin. "But even those inner signals – the self – aren't as direct as we want them to be. I mean – think about it. Our perceptions of the body aren't always constant. Our flesh is fallible. Even our cherished inner lives – you know, our personalities and how we think of ourselves -–are always changing shape. They're molded by memories, gut reactions, other people's ideas and opinions, jobs, responsibilities, expectations, hopes, dreams, lusts, desires, and fears."

"Yeah," Stuart agreed. "Right on."

"We even have different input to contend with, these days. Just think about movies, TV, and video games. All input that presents a distinctly different reality than what we are used to. It's no wonder our generation is so confused! Not only do we have to deal with our own mixed-up, mashed-up signals – we also have to sort through all the chatter of these differing realities."

Jesus. I was on a roll, wasn't I? The Other Me shook its metaphorical head and sighed. Weed-soaked, rambling philosophy in the dark. Like trains passing at midnight.

Someplace outside, a cat yowled.

"I hear what you're saying," Stuart said.

"Now," I continued, "imagine if, for some reason, some of these signals started to get fucked up. Imagine if our internal and external outputs turned back on themselves. What if your imagination and the subconscious start interfering with those supposedly constant external signals? What if external reality is just as moldable as the internal self?" I struggled for the words. "Perhaps, just as our own personal internal worlds are reshaped by constant signals, the external world is susceptible to the opposite. So: What if your own dreams started trying to hijack your concept of reality, and reshape it? What then?"

Stuart chuckled. "I suppose that's how you go crazy."

Despite the heat and the pleasant dopiness of the drug, I felt a chill run over my skin. The hairs on my arms stood on end.

I paused. I waited. I tasted the air. Then I asked, "Do you believe in God?"

Stuart thought about it. He thought about it in the stifling darkness for what seemed like a long time. Finally: "No." He licked his lips audibly. "Do you?"

I had been raised a devout Methodist – so much as Methodists can be devout – and had attended Sunday services almost every week until I went to college. To be frank, the more complex concepts of Christianity had never taken very strong root in my mind. As such, I simply fell out of the habit once I started attending UCLA. By the time the pastor read the sermon at my father's funeral, I had lost the need for God altogether.

So, truthfully, I answered, "I don't know."

Neither of us spoke after that. Stuart puffed on the diminishing blunt and I stared into the dark. The last four days' events played out in my skull over and over again, like a slideshow from Hell. Distantly, I felt the subtle magnetron pull of the sword propped in my closet.

"Dude," I suddenly said, "did we ever ask Allen if he knew that weird chick from the party?"

"No. No we did not."

"Shit."


	25. 25

**25**

Hot wind on my cheeks. Bright naked sun in my eyes. Burning sand and salt digging up between my bare toes.

A world of merciless white light, throbbing above and reflected below. The sirocco air swirled about my body and clawed at my face.

I stood and swayed, half-conscious, limp fingers brushing the skin of my abdomen. My lidded eyes blinked furiously. Greasy blond fronds of hair swished and fluttered about my mouth and nostrils.

Alkali flats stretched on and out until a liquid horizon. Here and there, the black hulks of basalt monoliths jutted like rotten teeth from the lifeless earth. One of them stood beside me, jagged and listing drunkenly to the left. On its grainy surface were carved cryptic symbols and twisting, inscrutable faces.

I tilted my numb face to the sky. Nothing but empty, cruel blue. At the center of it all, the pounding sun. Wastelands both above and below. Caught in the middle.

My exposed flesh felt like it might blister and slough off at any moment.

In the distance, a phantom form fluttered through the world-mirage. High above the parched reaches of hard white salt, something soared through the scorching air. Small and shining black now . . . then tilting, the sun shimmering hot vermilion in its wake. Coming into focus. Parting the curtain of rippling illusion; emerging triumphant. I could hear the beat of its immense wings as it gracefully rode the desert thermals. Its scales shone red on black; its raptor's eyes glittered; its rapier talons flexed and shuddered.

And still it grew closer.

I squinted against the sun.

A sound: Like someone tearing a sheet of paper in half across a hallway. Like a power transformer snapping angrily in the distance.

A smell: Like hot ashes and ozone.

A sensation: Of freefall; vertigo; staring over a cliff side at night.

The harsh, brilliant light grew until it consumed me.

When I awoke in bed, I swear that I had to rise sleepily and brush grains of sand from between my toes. The next morning, they were gone.


	26. 26

**26**

By Wednesday night, I had come to a decision.

I had passed the workday in a kind of advanced dream state. Every object held a secret. Every word and gesture had a deeper and more arcane meaning. I spent an hour staring blankly at my computer screen and moving the mouse cursor between desktop icons, as if trying to navigate an unseen labyrinth. When I spoke, it sounded as if an insensate lunatic had taken up residence in my body.

No one noticed. The office cubicles were abuzz with chatter. Murmurs and excited rumblings passed from lips to ears and back again, spinning through the employees like a rising gale. All day long, my co-workers eagerly dashed from desk to desk with the newest, goriest details. Beneath the decrepit _thunk_ of the useless air conditioning ducts, they shared rumors and half-grinned stories of blood, mutilation, and symbols carved deep into bare flesh.

The Bishop had struck again.

What little I did manage to process that day was often related to the incident. The local news networks and their respective websites were absolutely festooned in the story. They blazed with it.

POLICE DISCOVER NEW VICTIM.

Whoever she was, her body had been uncovered in an alley behind a Chinese restaurant. Farther afield this time – out in Thousand Oaks.

REPORTS CONFIRM FIFTH SLAYING.

The police were trying to keep mum about the whole thing. As new information trickled steadily in through the day, it was obvious that their PR blackout had more leaks than a broken colander.

BISHOP'S SYMBOL LEFT ON LATEST BODY.

For me, this was all a morbid little sideshow. It allowed me to continue my own grim musings and research unmolested for much of the day. Despite the constant whispery bombardment of new and ever-more-lurid information, I maintained a sense of surreal detachment. All these horrible things seemed to be occurring in a universe visible to – but inexorably divided from – my own. The moment the clock on the lower-right corner of my computer screen clicked over to five-thirty, I packed my things and made determinedly for the exit.

I spent the bus ride mulling my options and slowly refining the plan that had started forming in my head around noon. The slow, brutal sunset of a Los Angeles August singed the horizon. A rail-thin man in filthy dungarees and a grease-stained trucker's cap muttered to himself endlessly. A black woman with the figure of a beach ball and wide, nervous eyes clutched her purse close to her meaty forearms. A pair of overly-excited adolescent girls chattered back and forth in a patchwork cacophony of English and some Asian language I couldn't identify. The bus stopped and started, stopped and started. Figures entered and exited like silhouettes on an over-bright stage.

This was all background noise. I focused only on my hands and the briefcase settled beneath them on my thighs. I thought only of the Master Sword and all the uncertain horror it had brought into my life. I ticked carefully over the method by which I had decided to get rid of it.

As soon as I returned home, I slid into my room and opened the closet door. There it was: Cool silver in the shadows. The embossed Triforce shone like the winking eye of an old friend. It was as hatefully cheerful as ever.

You bastard, I thought. In the next moment, I considered how absurd it was to throw malice at an inanimate object. Still, I couldn't help but grin a bit at the prospect that I might be able to finally, after five long days, get rid of it. I felt an almost sadistic pleasure, coupled with subtle relief. When I turned over the next steps in my head, I felt my fingertips began to tingle in anticipation.

Between nodding blankly at breathless rumor-mongering and bouts of almost paralyzing paranoia, I had spent the workday plying the internet in search of possible answers. It occurred to me that I was perhaps looking at my situation too literally. Just because the sword resembled a fictional counterpart did not mean that the sword _was _its fictional counterpart. A simple Web search revealed that one could indeed purchase a replica of the Master Sword with relative ease. Various amateur blacksmiths and metal shop owners apparently supplemented their business by creating replica weapons for nerds with too much disposable income. Granted, few of the web sites mirrored the sure craftsmanship of the weapon propped against the back of my closet. However, it became apparent that, for a few hundred dollars or so, one could indeed get their hands on something that decently approximated a famous fictional object.

For a moment, this reassured me. The sword _could _be real and not necessarily in some abstract, belched-from-the-void manner either. Perhaps it was a gift, commissioned in acknowledgment of my lifelong _Legend of Zelda _fascination. But from whom? My mother? No – she had never been a very willing proponent of my hobbies. Lira? She would have mentioned it during our conversation the night before. Stuart and/or Allen? Improbable at best. Laughable, actually. It was more likely that they would be pulling some kind of elaborate prank if they were involved. So who had laid the recreated sword in my bedroom?

And why then, had I dreamed of it? Had I really experienced an acid flashback or psychotic episode, breaking into some poor bastard's house or shop to steal it?

I realized that, in the end, it didn't matter. All I wanted was to be rid of it. And as I scanned over the prices of replica swords from _The Legend of Zelda, Ninja Gaiden, _and _Final Fantasy,_ it finally came to me. I had literally jumped in my office chair, startled by the grotesque obviousness of the answer.

It was simple. So simple. I just had to sell the damned thing.

With the realization came a sense of arcane and almost superstitious certainty. I was so sure of the conclusion that it was as if I had stumbled across the weakness of some previously unstoppable monster. It was like silver bullets, a stake through the heart, or speaking a secret name.

Yes. That was the ticket. If I simply threw the sword into a dumpster, buried it beneath a rock, or hurled it into the sea, it might eventually come back to haunt me. But if I sold it, then its innate ownership would change. And more importantly, another person would have to acknowledge its existence. By offering the sword up to a stranger, I would see final proof as to my possible madness.

Of course, I was still being a chickenshit. Had I truly been willing to take the plunge, I would have simply hauled the sword into the living room and presented it to Stuart. Instant gratification. Or disappointment, as it were. In any event, the route that I had settled upon was circuitous at best. Paranoid stoner logic at its finest.

I shut the closet door partway and sauntered out to the kitchen to kill time. Stuart emerged from his room, bleary-eyed and wild-haired. As we discussed the day's events, I made grilled cheese sandwiches in a frying pan and opened a bag of potato chips. After this quick, pleasing meal, I took two puffs of newly-procured dirt weed and watched some nameless science fiction movie. I felt nervously excited, like a kid staring up at his bedroom ceiling on Christmas Eve.

The afternoon had brought high, thick clouds that cast beautiful shadows across the city. For an hour or two, I had looked out the office windows and hoped dimly for rain. No such luck – the cumulus giants had moved on, sharing none of their moisture with the dark specks scurrying below. Still, the brief cloud cover had been just enough to dampen the effects of the incessant, godforsaken heat. As night fell, thermometers finally dared to dip back into the eighties. For the first time in what felt like decades, the evening didn't pulse like some dark, sweltering purgatory.

By the time the sun finally descended over the beaches and drowned in the Pacific, the air breathing through the apartment windows felt downright pleasant. Warm, but not overly so. Redolent with the smells of greasy cooking, freshly-watered lawns, cigarette ghosts, and high octane car exhaust. It was the kind of night that, had I owned a car, I might have traveled up to Mulholland Drive and taken in the lights of the valley, joint in hand.

Instead, I rose and returned to my bedroom. I stripped off my work clothes and donned a pair of loose, worn jeans and a dark green tee-shirt. The shirt featured a pre-faded "Old No. 11" on the front, spelled out in a blocky font. I had no idea what the inscription meant, but a shirt is a shirt and this one did its job well enough. I bound my hair back in a ponytail and proceeded with my business.

My mind was mechanical now, focused only on the task at hand and the steps needed to achieve it. I grabbed an old black gym bag – one emblazoned with the ubiquitous "swoosh" of the Nike symbol – from the top shelf of my closet and tossed it onto the bed. After zipping the bag open, I raided my dresser and placed four pairs of folded boxers along its broad bottom. I turned, grabbed the sword with one hand, and slipped it into the open duffle bag. Once I was sure that the whole thing would fit, I arranged it carefully on its cushion of underwear. Finally, I retrieved the following and laid them in discreet layers on top of the sword: Two old shirts, a pair of running shorts, and another pair of underwear. I regarded the clothes and the weapon hidden within them, then zipped the bag shut.

I hefted the whole affair over one shoulder and immediately felt a stab of pain shoot through my chest. Shit. Forgot about that. After a moment's consideration, I swallowed a prescription painkiller dry, hoping that it would tide me over through the night.

No hesitation now. I moved with android sureness and precision. As I exited my room and entered the side hallway, Stuart caught sight of me.

"Where you goin'?" he asked.

I had rehearsed my response all day. "I'm going to go work out."

One of Stuart's dark, bushy eyebrows rose up. "Where?"

"A gym. I joined on Monday."

"O . . . kay," Stuart chuffed. "You didn't mention that before." He thought a moment. "And it's not like you need to lose any weight, man. You're built like you just wandered out of Dachau."

I shrugged. "Eh. I didn't want to be ostentatious. I could use some extra muscle mass, y'know? It's fine to be skinny, but I have about no upper body strength to speak of."

Nodding appreciatively, Stuart asked, "Do you know when you'll be back?"

Oh shit – isn't _that _ironic? It's not like you bother giving me this courtesy, Stew. "Don't know," I said, honest now. "It's not far. Probably no more than an hour or two."

"Heh, well, don't let the Bishop get you."

Grinning, I said, "He only kills women, dickcheese."

"Well, you know," Stuart sniffed. "You _do _have that long, luxuriant hair. Even _I_ think you're a chick sometimes."

"Whatever! I'll be back."

Stuart Ramirez smiled gently and raised a heavy forearm in farewell. "See ya', then. I'm gonna hop on and play some _Call of Duty_. I'll probably still be doin' that when you get back."

I returned the gesture. "Later." I strode to the front door and out into the night.

The cruel fire of day still clung to the west in glimmering tendrils. Above, the sky was a shroud of dirty black punctuated by the odd, dim glimmer of a star. As I walked down the cracked sidewalks to the nearest bus stop, the way was lit by the sallow, purgatorial glow of nocturnal Los Angeles. The desiccated forms of palm trees loomed in the dark like dead hands.

I stopped beneath the marker sign for the bus route, rocked back on my heels next to a doughy man in a rumpled suit, and exhaled sharply. I was really doing this. It was happening.

A weathered blonde man emerged from the shadows, sidled up to me, and jammed a cigarette between his lips. His tee-shirt advertised some death metal band; on it was a stylized ghoul greedily chewing at its own spilled entrails. The torn intestines twisted together to form the words "Tomb Wail." He rummaged about his pants pockets for a moment. Seemingly dissatisfied, he turned to me and asked, "Hey mate. You got a light?" He had a windy British accent.

I slipped a hand into my own pocket and felt my fingers curl around the plastic lighter within. It appeared in my hand like a magic trick, my thumb summoning a tiny orange flame mid-motion. "Here you go," I murmured.

He bent his whole body toward the lighter, dipped the cigarette into the flickering jet, and held it there a moment. His hooded eyelids fluttered with concentration. When he was satisfied that his cigarette was lit, he raised his eyebrows, took a drag, and said, "Cheers." And as quickly as he had appeared, he turned and strode casually down the street.

Moments later, my ride growled out of the night and shuddered to a stop.

Another bus, another blur of anxious faces and awkward glances. A different route, this time. Instead of taking me into the endless acres of office complexes and technology centers, this one wound deeper into Los Angeles proper. I didn't honestly know which stop I would get off at; this portion of the plan was meant to be improvised. It was only when I saw gaudy neon and barred windows that I tensed and readied to leave the bus.

When I stepped off onto the crumbling sidewalk, I wasn't really sure of where I was in relationship to my apartment. The neighborhood was the type that made you lock your car doors when you passed through. Each side of the street was covered in squat, ugly buildings built with cinderblocks and stucco. Some of the shops' windows were dark, either because of the hour or because the space behind them sat empty. Most blazed with light, even if they were closed for the evening. Skittering neon signs advertised the gritty, little-acknowledged underbelly of American culture: CHECK CASHING AND PAYDAY LOANS. LATE-NITE LIQUOR. XXX EROTICA – BOOTHES IN BACK!

I lingered only until I found what I was looking for: EXPRESS PAWN – YOUR TRASH 4 CASH. I started walking in that direction.

By now, the buzz of marijuana had exited my body, only to be replaced by the ghostly numbness of prescription painkillers. The night thrummed and rippled through a haze of Vicodin. An unpleasant, disconnected feeling. The paranoia remained – intensified, even. I walked the dark streets with the sensation that I now descended into a land of wind and hungry phantoms.

I passed two men in long coats, speaking to each other in tones of hushed panic. A homeless man approached me from a doorstep, holding out a skeletal hand. At one time, his skin must have been dark brown – now it was more of a dingy gray.

"Help a guy out?" he asked. His voice was full of sand and his breath stank of slow rot.

"Sorry. No cash," I sighed. It was the truth. I had purposely left my wallet at the apartment. I pushed past him, looking down at my feet as I went.

At last: The storefront rose up before me. Bright light flooded out between the bars behind the windows. I saw glimpses of stereo speakers, computer monitors, and televisions. I took a deep breath of ozone stink and entered the EXPRESS PAWN.

My entrance was greeted by the tinkle of bells.

I was somewhat surprised by the interior of the place. I had definitely expected someplace dark, dingy, and piled with half-broken spoils. Instead, the space was larger than it had seemed outside. High fluorescent light bulbs cast a wash of antiseptic light over neat rows of appliances and ordered racks of DVD's. On one wall were displays of sporting equipment; on the other, second-hand electronics. The blue carpet beneath my sneakers was clean and plush. The air smelled powerfully of window cleaner.

Still, I couldn't help but gaze around and regard the merchandise as the detritus of other people's broken, compromised dreams. No matter how organized and well-maintained the EXPRESS PAWN was, it was still a place of quiet desperation.

"Can I help you?" a voice called out from across the shop. I followed it to its source: A short, wiry Asian man standing behind a shop counter. Behind him was a rack of guns mounted on the wall, safely locked in a heavy steel cage. To either side of that were small television monitors, each showing a black and white angle of the store. I instinctively looked over my shoulder to the entrance, where one of the corresponding cameras perched like a homunculus.

"Sir?" the man behind the counter asked. He eyed my bag nervously, belying the ingratiating smile he now flashed.

"Oh – sorry." I rubbed a nervous hand across my forehead. My fingers came away coated in sweat. "Yeah," I said, approaching the counter, "I have something I hope I can sell."

The clerk – or owner, for all I knew – smiled even wider but dropped one hand tellingly below the countertop. It was obvious that he thought I meant trouble, and he intended to be prepared for whatever I might pull out of that long gym bag. "Well, we'll see what we can do," he said. He spoke with the brisk, clipped tones of a born-and-raised surfer. Up this close, I could see the weathering on his skin and in his hair. Years of wind, sun, and salt.

I winced as I lugged the duffle off my shoulder and onto the counter. "Yeah. It's . . . it's in here."

Though he had relaxed considerably when I took the bag out of my immediate control, the clerk's eyes remained wary. He watched my hands intensely as they rose to the zipper.

Here it was. Finally. The proverbial moment of truth. I took a deep, obvious breath and unzipped the duffle bag.

The clerk blinked and stared blankly into the depths of the gym bag, saying nothing.

Oh God. _Oh God. _In that moment, it became utterly clear – he could not see the sword. He didn't see the sword at all. My sphincter clenched and my teeth ground into one another. For two or three seconds, the world lost focus and became a kaleidoscope mosaic of meaningless color.

"Uh," he said, "you want to sell clothes? Gym clothes?"

I looked at him square and saw that the paranoia had fled him entirely. Now those dark eyes only showed a mixture of confusion and disgusted pity. Within moments, I had gone from potential robber to desperate crackhead.

I wanted to slap my forehead in embarrassment. Good Christ, Linus – get a hold on yourself. Get your shit together, son. Of course he can't see the sword – it's buried below your undies.

"Ha!" I chortled nervously. "Sorry about that. No – it's what's under the clothes. I needed to pad it, see?" I waited for him to remove the top layer of garments, realized that he had no intention of sticking his hands into a stranger's bag, and then folded back the shirts and shorts. The blade gleamed from the depths.

The clerk's eyebrows rose. "Cool!" He didn't hesitate now, darting both hands in to raise the Master Sword fully into the cold light.

Victory! Jubilation! Fireworks! Roman candles! Triumphant parades!

I could have leapt over the counter and hugged the man. I felt more relieved than I had ever been in the entirety of my life – more so than completing any final project or receiving the results of any health exam. I wanted to slump against the counter and fall to the ground in joy. It took great strength of will to hold it all together.

"This is sweet, man," the clerk smiled. "Where'd you get it?"

"My girlfriend bought it for me at a renaissance festival," I lied. "She knew how much I liked the games, so . . ." I spun my hand in the eternal gesture of _And so on and so forth_. All of this felt secondhand and numb – like my body was a puppet I was controlling from some great distance.

"Games?" he asked, genuinely confused.

I began, "Oh, you know _The Legend of_ . . ." I trailed off, watching the continued puzzlement on his lined face. "Never mind," I said. "How much can you buy it for?"

He slid the sword over a forearm, closing one eye and peering down its length. "Why do you want to sell it? It's a bit beat up, but it's the kind of thing I'd love to put up on a wall or something."

"We broke up," I said. Man, I was getting good at this brand of bullshit. "About a month ago. This thing just brings bad memories."

The clerk's closed eye suddenly snapped open. "Uh huh," he said mechanically.

Something wasn't right. The utter euphoria of my vindication dulled. I traced his gaze up the blade of the Master Sword . . . and straight to the dried, flaking blood on its edge.

Oh no. Shit. Shit!

I began to jabber. "Oh, man. I thought I cleaned that up! Fucking thing. Has an actual blade on it, right?" I stuffed my hands into my pockets, on the borderline of panic, any sense of composure shot to hell. It did not help that I was doped up on both opiates and the endorphins spilled by my earlier relief.

"What is it?" the clerk asked flatly. His eyes were walls.

"Blood." I saw him twitch. "My idiot friend got drunk and tried to play with it a few weeks ago. Cut himself pretty bad. He deserved it, the retard." I forced a laugh so fake that even I cringed slightly.

Whether he was the owner or just a clerk, I'll never know. However, I do know that the man behind the counter at EXPRESS PAWN was not stupid. As I stood there with a painful smile, I could see the wheels turning behind his eyes. Gears were clicking into place and spinning furiously. It was as if I could follow his thought process.

Here comes this kid out of nowhere, bearing a sword. _Click_. He seems pretty desperate to offload this thing. _Click. _There's blood on the blade – by his own admission. _Click. _Last night, some poor blonde got carved up like a roast and left beside a dumpster. _Click-click-click. _And here _he _is. Nervous as shit, sporting the remains of a black eye, sweating about a gallon a minute, looking as if he might bolt for the door –

And to be frank, as I created this little story in my head, I very nearly did. I managed to stand my ground.

Frowning, the clerk lowered the sword back into the waiting bag. "It's," he coughed slightly, "it's a moot point, man. We don't buy weapons."

Desperate now – almost as desperate as when I had walked through this man's door – I pointed to the guns behind his shoulder. "What about those?"

He shook his head slowly. The clockwork reasoning continued to clatter in his gaze. "Sorry, man. We don't buy knives or blades or what-have-you."

"This is more of a collectable –"

Adamantly, "Sorry. Store policy."

I felt my shoulders sag forward. So much for my grand victory. I would be lucky to get out of here without being dragged away in handcuffs. I quickly zipped the bag shut and shouldered it.

"It's okay. I can always try eBay," I said, turning away.

Behind me, the clerk's cautious voice: "Sorry I couldn't help you. Come back sometime, man." At that moment, I knew that he was going to phone the police as soon as I stepped foot out of the store.

I didn't even bother with a wave. I quickened my pace and sprang out the glass door of the pawn shop. The idiot jingle of bells swept me on my way. My breath began to draw hot claws across my ribs as I prepared to jog down the street and out of sight. So much for the painkillers. I focused only on getting distance between myself and the EXPRESS PAWN. My lips squeezed together in a bloodless grimace.

But then I stopped. My gait slowed, then halted. I stood at the corner of the EXPRESS PAWN building, which sat next to a three-story brick monstrosity of unknown age and purpose. Between the two was a long, darkened alleyway.

I was almost certain that I had heard someone scream.

Tilting my head, I shifted the weight of the gym bag and took a step closer.

No time for this. He's probably placing the call right now. Yes, officer. Stained with blood. A fucking sword, officer!

But – wait. "Help!" It was – yes. I heard it. Could have sworn I heard it. It reverberated up the alley and into the street. As I leaned in, my eyes adjusted slightly to the filthy darkness of the alleyway. A drainage gutter ran down its center, ferrying a thin stream of brackish, stinking water. At one spot or another, the high arc sodium lamps of the street cast their strange light in just the right angle to throw pools of sickly orange radiance on a section of wall or crumbling asphalt. The alley stretched back into pitch blackness. Somewhere along its length, something hissed and spat – a steam pipe, probably.

I did a foolish thing, then. "Hello?" I called out. My voice echoed between the bare walls and disappeared into the gloom.

Nothing answered except for the distant mutter of traffic and the continued sizzle of the unseen pipe.

Go. Go, you idiot. You're wasting time.

There it was again. Clearly, now: "Heeeeelp!"

A woman's voice. A _girl's _voice.

I heard another scream – distant. As if it were at some back-end, unseen section of the alley. "Help – please! Help!"

My hands began to shake. Jesus. Fuck!

I heard something odd then – a sort of low bleat in the darkness. It was very loud and alarmingly bestial. The girl's scream rose up and resonated against the brick and plaster. As it reached my ears, it warbled horribly and seemed to travel up and down my spine.

Don't do it. Run.

I almost did.

Don't do it! They're coming for you.

I have to help her. _Someone _has to help. She's screaming, you asshole!

My feet took off on their own volition.

Fuck fuck fuck! What the hell am I doing?!

I charged into the alleyway. The gym bag swung at my side like a pendulum. The walls, stained with mildew and run through with cracks, sped past me. The patches of umber witchglow splattered across my vision. The darkness loomed, oily and unrelenting. My pace slowed, but soon enough the light died out. All I felt was the asphalt beneath my feet; all I heard was the splashing of my shoes in the fetid gutter; all I tasted was the husk of my dry tongue; all I felt was the sticky blank air; and all and all –

I heard something familiar.

The darkness grew and enveloped me. It stretched across the world; it slipped; it shrank until it ran into my nostrils and down my throat.

My vision exploded. Dark, then bright. Overwhelming brightness. Beyond bright, and into something unnamable.

I saw nothing but white. And then . . . blue. A deep, sterling, depthless blue.

Warmth spread across my skin.

As I turned my head, I saw that the blue was dotted with slow, languid shapes that moved across it like ships across a perfectly calm ocean. Clouds, I realized. Clouds.

My pupils contracted.

A gentle breeze tickled the hairs on my forearms.

I looked down. "Oh my God," I whispered. My voice was very small.

I stood on a hill. Tall, swaying grass rose, by turns, to my knees and ankles. A bright, faultless sun sat amidst a sky that stretched like a colossus all the way to the green horizon.

Below me spread an endless, emerald prairie. The land undulated in lazy swoops and humps, dropping into shallow valleys and rising into pleasant little hills. Lush blades of dark green grass spread over almost every inch of ground. On the hilltops, small clusters of yellow and red flowers perched amongst the flawless fields of viridian. Here and there, groves of slim trees with fat, circular leaves sprang up like tight groups of worshippers. To my right, I could see the thin, shining line of a creek or river as it placidly wound its way between the taller hills.

The breeze blew, and the grass rippled like the waves of a jade ocean.

I did not blink. I dared not breathe. I felt the warm air, full of the taste and smells of rain and vegetation, as it settled in my nostrils and on my exposed tongue.

Then: "Please, please help! No! HEEEELLLLLP!"

And the screaming voice of the girl could not be more than a few hundred feet behind me.


	27. 27

**27**

I had died.

Yes. Of course.

All of this – the depression, the dreams, the waking hallucinations – had actually been the quiet first rumblings of a massive embolism. When I ran like a maniac down the open alleyway, the final triggers clicked into place and activated. Nearly-instantaneous brain death. My body must have tumbled to the filthy concrete like a glass-eyed doll. And that's where it _still _was, right? A corpse with a duffle bag under one arm, face half-submerged in a gutter running with oil-slicked water.

And now . . . _and now_ . . . Jesus. And now.

I wasn't even sure that I believed in an afterlife.

The sun shone bright as victory. Dead night turned suddenly to glorious day.

Despite appearances, this place _must _have been Hell. My personal register of sins was long and well-documented. Drinking. Drugs. Taking the Lord's name in vain on a regular and almost calculated basis. Lust – so much lust! Sloth and sublimated envy. Jesus (and there I go again), the list was fucking endless. I wasn't even sure what was a sin and what wasn't. It all blended together into a trackless lifetime of excess.

Yes. Hell. Absolutely. A warm, green Hell.

The quiet breeze was beautiful.

"No no no NO HELLLP!"

Oh God. There it was again. So close I could hear the echoing warble of her scream as it carried across the hills.

As if coming into focus, I heard a growing series of sounds: The swish-swash of grass as it parted with movement. A heavy thunk-a-thunk pounding, like hooves slapping hardpan in a movie Western. Voices rising up, whooping and laughing. A wordless, blubbering cry of unmistakable anguish. Something bellowed, and I realized that it was the same sound I had heard reverberating down the alleyway.

I my tongue flicked out and tasted the salt of the sweat on my lips. My grip tightened on the strap of my bag. A dumb pulse of pain sped from my shoulder and burst somewhere in my chest. The painkiller's weird dissonant tingle still buzzed in my fingers and elbows. So, why didn't the fucking thing do anything for the actual pain? I grimaced and heard something in my throat that sounded like an angry ferret.

Despite the sudden flare of pain, I still couldn't shake the mind-numb feeling that I had once more stepped headlong into a dream.

A delighted howl split the air. I heard distant shouted words rise to the sky. None of them made sense; I might as well have tried to concentrate on a physics lecture in Urdu.

Oh.

Oh God.

No going back now. No choice. Doesn't matter. No reason, no logic, no explanation. All I had was a duffle bag full of clothes, a sword, and all the world spread like incarnate madness before me. Turn. There's no choice, now. Dead or alive, sober or high, sane or crazy . . . You're at the end of your rope, Linus. Turn. Just turn.

Another scream reached my ears. Desperate. Pleading.

I turned. Stiff and mechanical as a cogwheel, I turned.

The sun shone over the plains like a painted dreamscape. A slope rolled from my feet and down into a wide, shallow meadow. A cluster of those tall, thin trees perched at the opposite end of the meadow, throwing a swath of shade out onto the grass. Near the center of the field sat a squat white shape with a curved top. Two other shapes moved in a circle about it, parting the carpet of grass and flowers as they went.

I blinked.

That central shape – it was a wagon. A tall, wooden wagon painted milky white. The tops of its wheels curved just over the blades of high grass. A pair of gray-flanked, horned animals stood reined at the head of the vehicle, tossing their heads in clear distress. One flailed out to the side suddenly, jerking the entire wagon with its movement. The terrified work animal stamped an unseen hoof and bellowed. So _that _was the sound from before.

Another girlish yelp sprang from beneath the wagon's shuddering bulk. I tried to follow the source of the cry. For a moment, I saw nothing. Then, a head of cinnamon-red hair bobbed up over the tips of the grass. I caught a glimpse of a frightened face and wide eyes, and then it was gone.

A moment later: "HEEEEELLLLP!" Her voice sounded tired and hoarse.

Another of the swiftly-moving shapes obscured my vision. Then another. I heard a growling shout and a high whoop of pleasure. Again, it took me some seconds to really understand what I was seeing.

Two figures rode around the wagon on the backs of low-slung animals. The riders held their hands in the air and howled as they went. Long black hair trailed them as their steeds barreled through the prairie vegetation. They curved around the wagon and disappeared from my view for some seconds, then reappeared on the other side of their loop. As they came, one of them pulled an arm back past his shoulder. In his other hand he held a curved wooden instrument. I heard a slick _twang_ and then something made a vibrato _thunk _against the side of the wagon. The girl made an incomprehensible, miserable sound. The rider cried out with heady triumph.

An arrow. My eyes widened. That fucker just fired a fucking _arrow _at the wagon. I could see the thin black shape of it as it quivered against the white of the wagon's wall.

The second rider followed close in the first's wake. He rolled his head and looked in my direction for only a second before tearing off in the endless circle about the wagon.

It was only in that moment that the entire scene before me finally clicked together and started to make a perverse kind of sense. Here before me was some kind of ox-drawn carriage or wagon, stuck in the middle of a lush meadow. At least one person cowered beneath it as riders blazed about it like Injuns out of some fucking Western starring John Wayne. And those riders . . . those riders . . .

I sucked a deep breath and felt my ribs sing with agony. I fought the urge to fall to my knees and weep, or perhaps to turn and run as fast and as long as my legs would carry me.

The riders were not human. It only took a single look – that hideous moment of forced epiphany – for me to realize that. I caught just a glimpse of a pinched face, a wide snout, tusks, and white paint spread over blue-gray skin. And those things they rode . . . God, I had seen but _not seen_, looking at the whole thing like a scene in a diorama or some distant television screen. Their mounts were _boars_. Huge, razorback boars that charged about the wagon and the trapped girl beside it like horrors from a fantasy novel.

My lips drew open. My face felt fuzzy and slack.

Not a fantasy novel. No. Don't be obtuse, Linus. You're running again, in your special little way. As much as you think you understand this, it's not really getting through to you. You refuse to make that last connection. Because you _have _seen this before, haven't you? You've seen some variation of it almost your entire life. Lit up in pixels and polygons, dancing to the tune of a controller. Carried on late nights and grand adventures.

I knew _exactly _who the raiders were. I knew exactly _what _they were.

As I stood numbly atop the hill, two more riders suddenly appeared from around the flank of the wagon. Already dumbstruck, I was somehow even more surprised to see that their mounts were horses rather than monstrous pigs. The horses trotted calmly through the field, skirting the hitched oxen. Their masters spoke animatedly to one another until they came to the side of the wagon where the girl was almost certainly still hiding. One of them gestured with arms held wide. I heard cruel laughter.

The two boar-riders (moblins, Linus – _moblins_) swung for around for another pass, then slowed to a halt beside their companions on horseback. The moblin with the bow in hand bounced up and down excitedly in his saddle, causing the titan pig beneath him to screech irritably. As the four creatures spread out about the side of the wagon in a rough semi-circle, I heard a whimpering cry of frustration and despair from the girl crouched below the grass.

It all felt too much like a dream. I was there, but not. I saw everything happening as it spread out below me, but didn't. Nothing was real, but it was _terribly _real. Unbearably real. Cruelly, concretely real.

One of the horsemen said something incomprehensible at this distance. In response, "Please no. Just leave us alone, please!" Unseen and seemingly at a loss, the girl kept speaking in a low, inaudible babble.

_I won't . . . I won't hurt you, baby. I won't hurt you._

My teeth ground together. I closed my eyes.

_Honey, please. Let me go. Come with me. Let's go._

No.

_Get the fuck away from me, you psycho!_

No . . . no. No no no.

_Your movements will be looser, harder, less restrained. Concentrate on those tae kwon do movements, but not the moves._

No turning back. You keep saying that to yourself. I keep telling myself in my quiet moments that I can't run away anymore. I keep lying to myself. I keep hesitating.

_I love you, Linus. And I believe in you. I know that you're really a smart, talented guy. You just need to let go of everything that's holding you down._

Let go. Just let go. Let it _all _go. Don't hesitate. You knew then and you know now what to do. You don't need some chemical crutch to do this, just like you didn't need it then. Don't hesitate. Don't falter.

_Or maybe it means that they're brave, wise, and powerful. That they've devoted themselves to a power and ideal handed down by the gods themselves._

Bullshit. It was all bullshit, lady. I don't know who you were, but . . . But all the same . . . _I can't run away anymore._

I didn't hesitate. My legs moved and my face drew back in a snarl. With the sun on my skin and my free hand struggling with the zipper of the duffle bag, I descended the hillside and straight into the meadow.

"Hey!" I yelled. The zipper pulled open with a clipped, metallic whine.

Faces turned.

I called again. "HEY! What the FUCK?!"

I jabbed a hand into the bag and slipped it off my shoulder in a single sinuous motion. The Master Sword switched into my right hand and swung to my side. I kept walking, leaving the bag crumpled on the ground behind me.

Each of the riders turned toward me now. No more than twenty yards separated us. I stopped and faced them down, silent and seething with a growing fury. My fingertips buzzed. Sweat rolled down my neck.

Up this close, I could finally get a good long look at the mounted creatures. The two boar-riders slouched in saddles of coarse brown leather. They wore vests and leggings of roughly the same material. Necklaces strung with off-white blobs of bone hung about their thick necks. Their black, matted hair was tied off in places and decorated with dangling feathers.

I thought back to the porcine moblin-things I had run into in the endless forest. I felt a moment of surprised realization – the creatures before me were different. They were certainly similar to the howling things that had chased me. Their backs rolled upward into humps and even the ones sitting high in horseback had a painful hunchback appearance. The resemblance to the boars they rode was undeniable. Wide, open-nostril snouts dominated their faces. Short tusks jutted from between their lips. Small, sharp ears terminated in elfish points. Their fingers were stubby, awkward things.

All the same, what confronted me now was something else entirely than the savages of the forest. Despite the fact that the encounter felt like it had taken place about an epoch ago, I could still imagine the dull, feral look in those moblins' eyes. That look was entirely absent on the faces of those before me. They regarded me with a sort of bemused curiosity, breathing through their snouts and leaning into their saddles. Whereas the forest moblins possessed soft, ugly bodies, the mounted moblins' physiques were much more streamlined and muscular. If it weren't for that awkward curvature of their spines, they might resemble humans completely save their faces and hands.

After a moment of confused silence, one of the moblins on horseback snapped the reins of his mount and gently nudged its ribs. The horse had a brown and white mottled coat, like a pinto. Alien red designs were painted on its sides. It tossed its mane, rolled its eyes, and started forward. The other horseman shook his head, chuckled, and followed the first.

Just as all of these moblins were different than their arboreal cousins, the two riding horses were different than the ones who sat silently atop the giant boars. The moblin holding slightly behind the first wore his beech-brown hair in what appeared to be some kind of dreadlocks. Rather than rough leather, his upper torso was covered with a glittering vest of chainmail and a ratty blue tabard. He held a long spear at his side, its steel tip shining as it brushed the blades of grass beneath him.

The horseman taking point had pure white hair pulled back in a clean ponytail. Two red lines were painted under each of his watchful eyes, contrasting sharply with his ashen gray skin. He wore clothing of a completely different make than the others – smooth and finely-made, yet completely unfamiliar to me. He wore a gray shirt or tunic beneath a buttoned vest of bronze-colored threads. Unlike the others, he wore black pants rather than leggings and polished black boots with spurs on their heels. He regarded me with a look of unmistakable antagonism.

The horsemen drew within ten feet of me. They circled twice before stopping.

A phantom thought whispered through my head: This was a terrible idea. My face remained stony. Muted anger and that fading opiate tingle continued to pulse along my arms and shoulders.

The moblin with pale features and intense eyes pulled on his horse's reins and regarded me. He made a strange gesture to the other and clicked his jaw. It was a hollow, final sound.

And then he did a curious thing. He opened his mouth and began to speak.

"Do you have business here, stranger?" he asked. His voice was a throaty mix of hard consonants and slurred vowels. It was low, growling, and pitched strangely. All the same, it was perfect English. "Move along. This is none of your concern."

I involuntarily drew back. The ghost of a smile pulled at my lips. "Jesus! You can talk?!"

The horseman in the blue tabard threw back his head and barked staccato laughter.

His brow furrowing, the first moblin chuffed, "Such things you Hylians say! Is it any wonder why we are at war? I ask you again: What is your business here?" Rage bled into his voice and made it ugly.

It felt surreal, having to respond to that. What could I say? Here was something obviously inhuman, chastising me for . . . For what, exactly? Confusion knotted my brow.

"I heard someone screaming. Seems like she needed help," I said.

The second moblin horseman tittered. His companion held up a hand and said, "As I said, it's none of your concern. We are exercising our right of plunder. It is best that you move along and act as if you never saw any of this."

"Fuck that!" I spat. I looked straight into the lead rider's eyes. They were gray – the same color as his odd skin.

He shook his head and sighed loudly through his immense nostrils. "You have no idea who you are talking to, do you?" he hissed. "You have no understanding as to what you insist upon butting into. Think hard, stranger. Think hard before you insult me as you just did. Do you know who I am yet?"

"Chief," I said angrily, "I wouldn't know you from fucking Adam."

It was the moblin's turn to look confused. He turned to his companion and let loose a series of rapid-fire whistles, clicks, and nonsense words. It took me a moment, but I soon realized that he was actually speaking some bizarre foreign language. The other rider nodded respectfully, chuckled quietly, and then responded in kind. I could pick out none of what they were saying, instead waiting patiently for them to finish the exchange.

At last, the lead rider turned back to me. A hideous, knowing grin spread across his face. "I am Karrik Fir-Bulbin," he declared. "My brother is Elkan Fir-Bulbin, captain of Lord Ganon's southern raiders. Do you understand yet?"

The sun was high and its rays fell upon me in pleasant waves. All the same, a chill spread across every inch of my skin. My intestines suddenly felt watery and loose. My previous anger dulled into a distant throb. After a moment, I merely shook my head. I held his gaze.

"Then you have either lived in a cave for some time, or are a wet-brained fool. Probably both." Mocking laughter rose from all three of the other riders. "We have raided this region for some months now, practicing our rights of pillage. I would have thought that our reputation preceded us by now."

"I'm a bit out of the loop," I admitted. My fingers tightened about the Master Sword's grip.

The lead rider – Karrik – threw up a hand and gestured behind him. One of the huge boars squealed angrily. I heard approaching hoof beats. He continued talking, his voice now tinged with amusement. "This is your last chance, stranger. Although you obviously think little of me and my race, I do not bear Hylians any inherent ill will. However, I _will _do what is necessary for my people to come away with victory," Karrik sighed. His voice suddenly seemed weary. "So: Turn around and walk the other direction. Leave now and pretend you never came here. Enjoy this beautiful day while you can."

No running, no denial, no retreat, and no hesitation. "No."

"Grrrraah!" Karrik made a noise of intense frustration. "Idiot boy!" he shouted. "What do you intend to do? Fight mounted cavalry with that little sword of yours?! Do you honestly believe that you can defeat all four of us?"

I became aware that the two boar-riders sat not more than ten yards to either of my flanks. Eyeing them as subtly as I could, I found myself saying ridiculous things. "You know, I didn't really think that through. I have to admit that coming down here was something of an impulse." Oh God, what was I saying? My mind seemed to detach from my lips and flesh altogether. "All I know is that you assholes need to get the fuck out of here before I'm forced to do something stupid."

"Too late," Karrik said drolly. He slowly drew a long, thin sword from an unseen scabbard on his back. Like the spear-point of his companion, it shone like silver fire in the sunlight. "You have stones, stranger. Too bad you lack the same in brains."

I tensed. No time to consider how suicidally stupid this was. My knees went loose; the muscles of my calves twitched expectantly. No time to wonder whether I was about to die.

Wait. Was I?

Oh fuck oh Jesus Mary shut up just shut up.

My teeth pressed together painfully and I suddenly realized that my hands were shaking. I could feel an adventurous blade of grass that had poked up my pants leg and now tickled the flesh just above my socks.

A gust of wind fell from behind me and rippled the surface of the meadow. A tiny white flower in the shadow of Karrik's horse swayed back and forth on the current of the breeze.

The great boars huffed and grunted and bit at their reins. Their riders leaned forward and spread porcine grins of anticipation.

Strange leaves rustled atop strange trees.

Metal flashed. The moblin in chainmail adjusted the grip on his spear and ran a calming hand through the mane of his nervous horse.

Clouds dappled the falling sunlight.

An insect buzzed obliviously from the shade. Somewhere, a bird called.

Atop his horse, no more than a few long strides away from me, Karrik grimaced. "Go," he breathed. And then, louder: "Go! GO! Fahd! Fahd ka dom," (and at this point, he made a half-clicking, half-grunting sound I cannot begin to approximate), "you fools! GO!" His boots jabbed into his horse's sides.

And then I was in it, all or nothing.


	28. 28

**28**

Both boar-riders whipped their reins and charged, shouting a mad war cry as they came. Their mounts followed suit, roaring grotesquely. The sound was unnervingly similar to the moblins of the woods: "Skreeeeee!"

I had one last thought before being borne away on a wave of adrenaline and endorphins: This is the stupidest thing you've ever done, and you're going to die.

My legs launched me forth, straight for Karrik and the other horseman. The tall blades of grass swished and parted, sweeping about my legs as I dashed forward. I came at the two moblins at a dead run.

Behind me, the sound of bulky hooves grew and passed. I felt a gusty wake of wind and smelled something rank and hairy. One of the riders croaked out what had to have been a frustrated curse.

Karrik's horse reared up, startled by my sudden approach. I drove to its left, putting it between myself and the spearman. As the horse fell back, Karrik snarled and tugged violently at the reins. I slashed out blindly to the right with the sword. The movement was awkward and wobbling, hitting nothing but air. I struggled to correct the momentum the attack had created and felt my trajectory veer off further to the left. My feet threatened to tangle beneath me and send me pitching onto the ground.

Hooves slammed and pounded in my ears. My heavy breathing and pulsing heart sounded like the roar of surf as if broke against a tidal cliff. Hot needles stabbed over and over across my chest.

I corrected my gait and forced myself to a halt. I whipped my entire body around just in time to see one of the boar-riders thunder from behind. The boar's foul tongue lolled out of its maw as it threw its head this way and that, jerking its rider's arms with each spastic movement. Its tusks looked deadly sharp as it grew larger and larger in my vision.

Shitshitshit!

I threw myself sideways, tumbling out of the boar-rider's path and headlong into the grass. Landing on my shoulder, I rolled through sweet wet darkness. The world tumbled end over end. The sky switched places with the earth, and for a moment I lay on my back. Blades of grass rose before me like spires, piercing the blameless blue above. Something small and spindly landed on my hand, chirped contentedly, and then leapt away. I considered how nice it would be to just stay there, laying in the cool shade of the prairie grass and staring up into the sky.

"GYAAYAAYAHH!"

The ululating, bloodthirsty yell was all it took for me to sit bolt upright. The world corrected itself. Sky took its rightful place over soil. The approaching shape of the other boar-rider pushed into the corner of my vision. I rolled blindly out to the right.

As I did, the clomp of hooves grew even louder. Had I not dodged? Had I not . . .

Something very fast sliced past my face and buried itself in the ground at my knees. The shaft of an arrow wobbled for a moment, then went still.

Arrows. I forgot about the fucking arrows.

I forced myself to my feet and looked left. Both boar-riders rode out farther into the meadow, side-by-side. One notched another arrow onto its bow, while the other clumsily attempted to manage the reins of its beast with one hand and a jagged war-club with the other.

Movement behind me: I spun about to face it, messily bringing my sword up over my chest. Karrik came at me at a full gallop. His face was a rancorous mask. He raised his thin sword – a rapier, I realized – and howled a single insensate word.

I waited, poised. As he drew within three or four galloped steps, I ducked right. With both hands firmly on the pommel of my sword, I held it horizontally and ran forward as fast as my burning legs would carry me.

My entire body shuddered with the ensuing collision. I struck the horse's flank at an awkward angle, driving my sword into it as hard as I could. The force of both bodies' speed and mass sent me careening in a wild, half-blind direction. I heard the horse scream and felt something hot and wet spatter across my arms. As I came to stop, I fell to one knee. My head swam. My fingers shuddered and flexed. I opened my eyes and saw blood across the blade of the sword and spackled across my forearms.

No time to rest. I was up and turning in moments, looking wildly for the closest opponent. The two boar-riders had broken apart and were heading at me at determined lopes, one to my side and one approaching head-on. Out to my left, Karrik's horse pitched and bucked, still wailing horribly. On its left flank was a wide gash, openly spurting fresh blood.

I smirked.

Suddenly, something charged into the right side of my vision. Quick, savage movement. I pivoted as fast as I could to meet it.

Not fast enough.

The world exploded. Something hard and cold and sharp ripped across my face and ricocheted off my left cheekbone. I saw nothing but brilliant white light and dancing black spots. All of my nerves seemed to fire at once. I tried to cry out, but my throat closed and my lungs convulsed. Overwhelming pain reverberated like an earthquake through my skull. My bones shook with silent agony. I felt a gentle wind and the tingle of freefall. It came to me that the blow had literally knocked me off my feet.

I landed. Hard.

I blinked furiously. My vision blurred and rippled like a piece of burning filmstrip. Once more, I lay at an angle that stretched the grass and expanded the sky. I'm going to pass out, I thought. My skull pounded. Something poured over my chin and down my neck. I sniffed and realized that it was blood. My blood. Face aching and every muscle above my shoulders on fire, I hauled myself up out of the grass and onto my knees.

Oh God. Here it is. This is how I die.

A soft wind billowed my shirt and played about the raw wound on my face. The exposed nerves and muscle fibers crackled as they met the open air.

Come on. Come on!

I shuddered back to my feet and stood.

Come on, you fucker!

The spearman cackled as he came into my sight. He casually ambled his horse in a slow arc. The tip of his weapon dripped liquid red. I understood then that if I had not turned when I did, the spear would have gone straight through the other side of my skull instead of simply skipping off the bone.

My breath heaved. I could see the two boar-riders match movements, coming around to flank either side of me while the spearman kept me pinned down.

The moblin before me smiled toothily. He spoke, low and lazy. "Yat ka Ganon, _chief_. Yat ka moka-ro. Moka-ro tak. I shit on your corpse, palebelly."

He angled his horse back toward me and lowered the spear.

I sucked a storm of air through my nostrils. Crushed grass. Pollen and wildflowers. Distant sap. The sharp, fecund smell of livestock. An overpowering stink of hot blood.

The boar-riders approached on both sides.

All or nothing.

The spearman charged. I charged back. On either side of my peripheral vision, the boar-riders careened in at ugly angles, overshooting their marks. I heard a wild arrow _twang _and soar high over my head. The giant boars squealed and keened as their riders pulled up on the reins. They disappeared. All I saw now was the spearman. Only half a second separated me from the end of his pointed weapon. A half second . . . A half-fucking go go GO!

I broke left, out of the path of the spearhead, and then propelled my entire body to the right. With my free hand, I grabbed at the reins and bridle of the horse, and then _pulled_. My grip was slippery and my weight awkwardly distributed, but as I wrenched my torso backward the effect was clear. The spearman rattled back and forth in his saddle; the horse whinnied and balked; I threw my entire weight into pulling the fucker down off his mount. I let my right hand free and brought the hilt of the sword down on the spearman's hands. He howled with pain.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the boar-riders whip back past us and out toward the wagon. They were setting up for another approach.

I felt my body tilt upward as the horse reared and kicked. I flapped awkwardly with my loose hand, swatting to and fro with the flat of my sword. It connected with nothing, and then suddenly slapped headlong into the spearman's face. He made a startled, agonized sound and tumbled backwards. As the horse reared up again, I plummeted as well. For the third time, the world upended in a series of illogical Escher spins.

As I hit ground, the horse took off. I looked up and noted with no small amount of pleasure that it had departed without its rider. The spearman wobbled to his feet with a dazed expression. I took a step forward on legs that felt like soft rubber. I gripped the Master Sword with both hands and raised it to my side.

"Shit on _my _corpse?" I wheezed. "Fuck you!"

As action-hero lines go, it was fairly weak.

I bounded forward just as he was wanly raising his spear, and then swept the sword upward in a kind of half-assed uppercut. A shriek of horror and pain; something soared through the air and fell with a meaty _thump_; the familiar wet heat of spilled blood landed on my face and neck. I stepped back to see the spear lying forgotten in the grass. The moblin moaned and clutched at his right arm, which suddenly seemed to end about two inches below the elbow. Blood poured from between his gripping fingers.

Out near the wagon, the boar-riders wheeled about for their next charge. Suddenly, a lithe form with dark hair popped up from the grass surrounding the oxen. It wound up one shoulder and then heaved forward. Something rocketed out of its hand and struck one of the riders square in the face. Even this far out, I distinctly heard the ugly _splitch _of splintering bone. The boar-rider was propelled out of his saddle and spun into the grass. The riderless boar swerved wildly, keening and mewling as it went. It cut the other off, causing the remaining rider to veer into a wide, panicked run toward the grove of trees. Still making sounds like a slaughterhouse victim, the wild boar took off toward the edge of the meadow and disappeared.

I gawped. "Fuck me," I whispered.

Before me, the spearman had fallen to his knees. His skin had gone waxen and his sides shook. He looked up at me with a mixture of naked confusion and fear.

"Lam! Fahd ka met!"

A voice rose behind me, with the sound of hooves in its wake. Karrik. I threw myself to the side, managing to maintain my footing only by the slimmest of margins. Karrik's injured horse blazed past me and put itself between me and the spearman. It whinnied pitiably.

Karrik whirled and spat, "This isn't over, stranger! You have stirred up a great nest of hornets! I swear that I will find you and make you pay for what you have done today!" He swept a hand down and hauled the wounded moblin up behind him. Both regarded me hatefully, and at once Karrik spurred his horse forward. It barreled out toward the edge of the field where the boar had exited stage right. Within moments, the two vanished over the hillside and were gone.

A curious, breezy silence settled over the meadow. Wind gently swept the blades of grass and tussled the treetops.

I felt my body sway. The sword fell to my side and dangled. Everything made of meat on me hurt. Thigh and abdominal muscles throbbed. Tendons twitched and ached. The shredded muscle of the spear wound continued to pulse with a sputtering, almost electric pain. Somewhere behind my forehead, it felt like a jet engine had caught fire.

Blood and sweat mingled in a thin pool across my shoulders. Fronds of grass and bits of dirt stuck to my body in odd places. My shirt felt like a slimy membrane.

A wispy cloud moved across the sun. Quiet darkness fell in a pleasant shroud across the little valley.

Five days ago, my life had been meaningless. Each day had been the same as the last, in a never-ending litany of lost hours. And then had come that Friday, and all its attendant wonders. I thought about Allen and Stuart, beer and pot, Marilyn and Bryan. I thought about that nameless woman and her coal-dark eyes, smiling like a sphinx. I remembered everything that had seemed so normal, before my old life had been swept away, as if by some great tidal wave.

I looked down at the sword I gripped in my right hand. It shone silver and flowing red. The Triforce seemed to glow with triumph. Everything had started with this. It had been my albatross and my talisman. It carried me and drove me down. And somehow, some way, it had led me to this moment.

The blood sprayed across my face was beginning to go cool and tacky. I blinked and felt a spot of it smeared across my eyelid.

Something welled up in me then, like shining oil bursting up from the earth.

"Heh."

I laughed. Just a dry chuckle at first.

"Hahaha . . ."

Then, a painful guffaw.

"Hahaha . . . HAhaha. HAHAHA! AH! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

And then I was suddenly laughing uncontrollably, like a madman. I threw back my head and laughed. I let the sword slip from my fingers and laughed and felt my sides groan in agony and still laughed. The sound of it spread like fire, echoing across the meadow and rising up to the wondrous sky. I hiccupped and tasted tears as they ran across my lips and down the back of my throat.

I fell to my knees.

Not just laughing. Weeping. Openly, hysterically weeping. I shook like an afflicted man in a faith healer's tent. Open palms brushing the tops of the grass, I shook and laughed and wept and took in the wide world like a child born anew.

Not twenty minutes ago, I had stood in the night streets of Los Angeles. I had wandered miserably toward what had seemed an inescapable fate – submission to a future filled with paranoia, fear, and insanity. It had seemed the end of happiness and the start of something beyond terror and darkness. Something unbearable. But then . . . then . . . night became day. Dark became light. Ignorance became a kind of twisted understanding. And now I was _here_, wherever _here _was. I had my ideas of course, but . . . Jesus. It was insane. It was madness, right?

But what a beautiful madness it was!

_End of Part One_


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